Allocation of layer bandwidths and FECs for video multicast over wired and wireless networks

Layered multicast is an efficient technique to deliver video to heterogeneous receivers over wired and wireless networks. We consider such a multicast system in which the server adapts the bandwidth and forward-error correction code (FEC) of each layer so as to maximize the overall video quality, given the heterogeneous client characteristics in terms of their end-to-end bandwidth, packet drop rate over the wired network, and bit-error rate in the wireless hop. In terms of FECs, we also study the value of a gateway which "transcodes" packet-level FECs to byte-level FECs before forwarding packets from the wired network to the wireless clients. We present an analysis of the system, propose an efficient algorithm on FEC allocation for the base layer, and formulate a dynamic program with a fast and accurate approximation for the joint bandwidth and FEC allocation of the enhancement layers. Our results show that a transcoding gateway performs only slightly better than the nontranscoding one in terms of end-to-end loss rate, and our allocation is effective in terms of FEC parity and bandwidth served to each user.