Adaptive Broadband Video Streaming using H.264 Scalability across a Tandem Network

Abstract—As content management systems for IPTV reduce the latency between server and mobile device, real-time video streaming can tolerate single negative acknowledgments in the event of packet loss. However, the extent of packet retransmissions can be graduated and this paper proposes a scheme that is adaptive to whether network congestion or wireless channel degradation is most responsible for packet loss (or a mixture of both). By using the scalable variety of an H.264 codec, selective retransmission of base and enhancement layers is possible. The paper exhibits the trade-offs that arise as a result of adaptive wireless broadband video streaming. The scheme has been applied to a tandem network, i.e. a heterogeneous network with one part consisting of a wired IP network and the second part consisting of a broadband wireless access network. Keywords- graceful degradation; H.264/SVC; NACKs; tandem network; video streaming; WiMAX I