CUPS: coupon-based unequal protection scheme for delivering multimedia over Internet

Today, delivering multimedia information over Internet becomes more popular. But the best-effort nature of Internet and the lack of congestion control for streaming applications in Internet pose the major challenges in transferring multimedia over Internet. In this paper, we first point out that the sub-structures in a coded multimedia stream have different importance in video reconstruction. Then a new TCP friendly scheme named as coupon-based unequal protection scheme (CUPS) is proposed to enlarge the network transmission efficiency and improve the video reconstruction quality (measured by PSNR) by providing unequal protection to different structures in a coded media stream. Different from traditional unequal protection schemes [U. Horn, et al., Sept. 1999; K. W. Stuhlmuller, et al., April 1999; E. Mohr, et al., June 2000], CUPS is implemented in transport layer instead of application layer. By taking MPEG-coded streams as our examples, the absolute protection mode and the relative protection mode are introduced to provide protection of different granularities to streaming flows. Extensive simulation work is conducted to verify the performance of our scheme. And the simulation results show that our scheme can effectively provide unequal protection to different sub-streams inside a streaming flow.