A complexity-aware live streaming system with bit rate adjustment

For a live streaming server, it is highly desirable to allocate the available computational resource and bandwidth to each channel fairly and efficiently. In this paper, we propose a complexity-aware live streaming system with bit rate adjustment that can handle the allocation of bandwidth and computational resource of a live streaming server. The proposed system encodes the input videos at different quality levels based on the priority of the input videos and the available computational resource. It incorporates a bit rate adjustment mechanism to compensate for the video quality drop resulted from the quality level change of high priority encoders. The resulting system is able to handle channels more efficiently because the complexity of high priority encoders can also be dynamically adjusted with little quality drop. A new complexity adjustment method is developed that enables the system to stabilize more quickly and minimizes the variance of the time buffer. The experimental results show that the system can handle more channels while still maintaining the quality of high priority encoders. The proposed system is applicable to multimedia home gateways, surveillance, IP-based TV, and on-line sports game relays.