Performance control over heterogeneous receivers for video multicast

Multiple Description with Forward Error Correction coding (MDFEC) provides the flexibility, easy adaptivity and distortion-rate optimality that are desirable for delivering streaming video in a network environment with time-varying bandwidth fluctuations and random packet losses. In this paper, we consider the issue of trading-off the performance between clusters of receivers with low access-link bandwidth (such as wireless users) and receivers with high access-link bandwidth (such as wired users). We show that the average distortion of the low-bandwidth cluster is a non-decreasing function of an introduced weighting factor λ while that of high-bandwidth receivers is a non-increasing function of λ. In other words, the difference of average distortion between low-bandwidth and high-bandwidth receivers can be controlled monotonically by the introduced weighting factor λ. We also provide experimental verification as a function of λ for various numbers of descriptions using group of pictures (GOP) from well-known Foreman and Akiyo CIF test clips.