Packet scheduling for multiple description video streaming in multipoint-to-point networks

This paper presents a client-driven rate-distortion optimized packet scheduling algorithm for streaming multiple description (MD) encoded video, where the descriptions are distributed among different video-on-demand servers. Previously, multiple description coding (MDC) has been proposed to provide reliable video communication within a content delivery network, where the main goal was to imitate path diversity by using multiple servers concurrently. Although this approach can alleviate the severe effects of bursty packet losses, transmitting video packets in a time-sensitive and network-adaptive manner is fundamental to the success of MD streaming. Hence, in this paper we propose a packet scheduling algorithm that maximizes the quality of the video rendered at the client under the given rate constraints. This algorithm jointly considers the timeliness requirements of the streaming application, dependency structure of the streamed video, network conditions as well as the error-resiliency features of MDC.