Enhanced H.264/AVC video streaming using network-adaptive multiple description coding

This paper presents a network-adaptive multiple description coding (MDC) method for enhanced video streaming over multipath channels. The novel feature of the proposed MDC network adaptation scheme is the generation of a controlled amount of side information to compensate for drift distortion due to packet loss. This yields higher robustness of multiple description (MD) H.264/AVC streams than single description (SD) ones. Multiple Description Scalar Quantisation (MDSQ) is used to split an SD video stream in two complementary streams (two descriptions) for transmission over a multipath channel. The simulation results show that significantly better quality is achieved by using the proposed scheme instead of either SDC streams or classic SDC-MDSQ network adaptation without side information.