On the Comparison of Real-Time Rate Control Schemes for H.264/AVC Video Streams over IP-Based Networks Using Network Feedbacks

Real-time rate control techniques are necessary to applications such as video streaming in order to adapt video sending rate to network conditions so that the perceived video quality is optimised. In this paper two realtime rate control schemes, are presented. The first one uses the currently available bandwidth in order to perform rate control by selecting the optimum QP (Quantization Parameter). The second rate control scheme is based on measurements of the current packet loss in order to select the optimum QP parameter. Through extensive simulations on a test-bed environment both schemes are studied under diverse network conditions and are compared against the commonly used Rate-Distortion optimization scheme, which is embedded on a video encoder.