Expected Run-Time Distortion Based Scheduling for Scalable Video Transmission with Hybrid FEC/ARQ Error Control

The optimal packet scheduling for transmitting scalable media over the packet erasure networks has been extensively studied in the past. In the existing work, only retransmission is used for packet loss recovery. As a result, when the round-trip-time (RTT) of the network increases, the performance of the system degrades fast. In this paper, a scheduling scheme for hybrid FEC/ARQ error control is proposed. In our proposed scheme, the importance of both data packets and FEC packets are evaluated by considering several factors, such as data dependency structure of scalable video, transmission history of other packets, as well as the decoding deadline, and the most important packet is chosen to be sent out. In this way, our proposed scheme is able to achieve more stable playback video quality by taking advantage of both FEC and ARQ, as demonstrated by the experimental results.