Layered quality adaptation for Internet video streaming

Streaming audio and video applications are becoming increasingly popular on the Internet, and the lack of effective congestion control in such applications is now a cause for significant concern. The problem is one of adapting the compression without requiring video servers to reencode the data, and fitting the resulting stream into the rapidly varying available bandwidth. At the same time, rapid fluctuations in quality will be disturbing to the users and should be avoided. We present a mechanism for using layered video in the context of unicast congestion control. This quality adaptation mechanism adds and drops layers of the video stream to perform long-term coarse-grain adaptation, while using a TCP-friendly congestion control mechanism to react to congestion on very short timescales. The mismatches between the two timescales are absorbed using buffering at the receiver. We present an efficient scheme for the distribution of available bandwidth among the active layers. Our scheme allows the server to trade short-term improvement for long-term smoothing of quality. We discuss the issues involved in implementing and tuning such a mechanism, and present our simulation results.