End-to-end stored FGS video transmission based on adaptive smoothing and TCP-friendly rate control

This paper presents a design of an end-to-end smooth and TCP-friendly transmission for stored MPEG-4 fine-grained scalable (FGS) videos over the best-effort Internet. We first present a novel framework for FGS video delivery over a TCP-friendly connection. Under the assumption of complete knowledge of bandwidth evolution, we derive an optimal policy for layer selection such that consistent quality playback is ensured when the network conditions are constantly varying. Based on this ideal optimal policy, we develop an online heuristic smoothing algorithm based on bandwidth prediction. Through simulation experiments, it has been shown that heuristic policy performs almost as well as the ideal optimal policy for a wide-range of bandwidth scenarios, and smooth and TCP-friendly video transfer can be accomplished by our proposed scheme.