Performance Analysis of Scalable Video Adaptation: Generic versus Specific Approach

This paper provides a performance analysis of adaptation approaches designed for scalable media resources. In particular, we investigate the streaming of media resources compliant to the scalable video coding (SVC) extensions of advanced video coding (AVC) within heterogeneous environments, i.e., terminals and networks with different capabilities. Therefore, we have developed a test-bed in order to analyze two different approaches for the adaptation of scalable media resources, namely a generic approach that is applicable independently of the actual scalable coding format used and a specific approach especially built for SVC. The results show that if adaptation is required the generic approach clearly outperforms the approach specifically built for SVC.