Distributed multimedia transmission from multiple servers

We address the problem of streaming video efficiently from multiple servers in a distributed manner. Invoking a scalable video encoding format, we describe a network-friendly, rate-distortion efficient distributed streaming algorithm based on a robust distributed encoding paradigm. The algorithm is efficiently matched dynamically to both the video content and the network channel conditions. Due to the diversity effect of multiple servers, our distributed algorithm is immune to single points of failure, provides natural load-balancing of the multiple servers and a graceful degradation in quality with an increase in multi-server load or a decrease in network throughput.