Real-time low-complexity adaptive approach for enhanced QoS and error resilience in MPEG-2 video transport over RTP networks

In this paper, the problems of redundancy allocation for providing effective error-resilience and service class distribution for enhanced quality of service (QoS) in real-time MPEG-2 video transport are addressed. A real-time low-complexity content-based adaptive error-resilient approach is proposed for the transport of MPEG-2 video streams, encapsulated using real-time transport protocol (RTP) and delivered over heterogeneous networks. An algorithm is derived using spatial and temporal properties of MPEG-2 video for assigning weights to each packet based on the estimated perceptual error. These weights, which indicate the relative importance of RTP packets, together with the communication channel characteristics are used to determine the allocation of resources for providing improved error-resilience and for assigning data packets to various classes of service in order to enhance the quality of transmission. Parameters extracted from the RTP header are used to determine the weights, so that the proposed algorithm can be implemented in real-time. This algorithm is used for adaptively allocating redundant forward error correction packets as well as for marking and forwarding of RTP packets in differentiated services (DiffServ). Simulation results are presented to show the significant improvement in performance based on our proposed approach to video transport.