Robust transmission of MPEG video streams over lossy packet-switching networks by using PET

Abstract. Network heterogeneity is a major issue and multimedia applications have to deal with interconnected networks consisting of many sub-networks of non-uniformly distributed resources. Real-time traffic caused by video sources is bursty by nature, resulting in buffer overflow at the switch and unavoidable packet losses. Therefore the information is desirable be compressed and prioritized in a way that the application gracefully degrades during adverse network conditions. Priority Encoding Transmission (PET) is an approach to the transmission of prioritized information over lossy packet-switched networks. The basic idea is that the source assigns different priorities to different segments of data, and then PET encodes the data using multilevel redundancy and disperses the encoding into the packets to be transmitted. The property of PET is that the destination is able to recover the data in priority order based on the number of packets received per message. This report summarizes the results to date obtained from the PET project and gives direction of on-going and further work. The paper describes the fundamentals of the theory on which PET is based, the integration of PET with MPEG-1, some experimental results, and an application tool RTP-based, VIC-MPET, which allows encoding and playing robus