Predictive control of video quality under fluctuating bandwidth conditions

This work shows that scalable video techniques together with a controlling mechanism for a device that receives and decodes video data provide a solution to some challenges posed by in-home networks. The challenges are resource limitations of devices (processor, memory, etc) and network (bandwidth). Additionally, a wireless network usually has bandwidth fluctuations that consecutively lead to rapid throughput fluctuations. These rapid changes severely reduce the quality of viewing as perceived by an end user. We developed a controller that optimizes user-perceived quality when looking at available input data and available processing power. The quality is optimized by smoothening the quality fluctuations and avoiding deadline misses. The strategy used by the controller is created offline by means of a Markov decision process