Practical Channel-adaptive Video Streaming with Fountain Codes

Video streaming over the Internet and packet-based wireless networks is sensitive to packet loss, which can severely damage the quality of the received video. Application-layer forward error correction is commonly used to protect the transmitted video data against packet loss. However, since network conditions are unpredictable, determining the right amount of redundancy introduced by the channel encoder is not obvious. This paper presents a practical implementation of a unicast video streaming system that solves this problem by using a rateless code and receiver feedback. In real simulations over the Internet our solution outperformed a standard approach based on fixed-rate forward error correction. For an Internet connection Konstanz-Beijing-Konstanz and the standard Foreman sequence compressed with the H.264 video coder, the gain in average peak signal to noise ratio exceeded 3.5 decibels at 90 kilobits per second.