Streaming H.264 scalable video over data distribution service in a wireless environment

The Data Distribution Service (DDS) middleware is enjoying a rapid adoption in high-performance, mission-critical networks. At the same time, the H.264 Scalable Video Coding (SVC) has been recently standardized and it is deemed to be an effective solution for video streaming over a channel with time-varying bandwidth, like the wireless one. In these conditions, it is critical to adapt the video bit-rate to the actual wireless capacity, and bit-rate adaptation is extremely simple for a H.264 SVC video. In this paper we devise, evaluate and demonstrate a technique for streaming H.264 SVC video over a DDS middleware. The contribution is threefold: i) we design a structure of the DDS data-unit able to carry H.264 SVC video-units; ii) we devise a receiver-driven rate-control mechanism based on our DDS data-unit and exploiting specific DDS functionality; iii) we implement and show the effectiveness of our mechanism in an 802.11 wireless scenario, comparing our proposal with other solutions.