Distributed Multiple Description Video Transmission via Noncooperative Games With Opportunistic Players

Recent works have shown how multiple description coding proves to be an effective solution for multimedia streaming over peer-to-peer (P2P) and content delivery networks (CDNs). However, the presence of losses and congestions throughout the network affects the visual quality of the reconstructed sequence at the end terminal. These inconveniences can be mitigated by specifying different levels of Quality of Service, but an optimal packet classification is hard to obtain since P2P and CDN protocols operate at higher protocol layers (ignoring network conditions of the lowest stages), the network can be quite distributed and little information can be available regarding other network segments involved in the transmission. The peculiarities of the transmission scenario require a distributed and robust packet classification strategy that grants both intra-stream and inter-stream diversities among the loss patterns for the different streams. The classification approach presented here is characterized via a noncooperative game, where the different uploading nodes are players/descriptions competing for the allocation of the available network resources. Each player may switch from a selfish strategy to a more cooperative strategy according to its convenience (opportunistic players). Experimental results show that the proposed solution proves to be quite effective under different network scenarios.