A sequence-based error recovery algorithm for a multiple description P2P video transmission system

Abstract

Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks are distributed systems that aggregate a large amount of independent nodes known as peers. This model is expected to resolve observed limitations in current centralized video streaming solutions and to improve in a significant way their performance. Multiple description coding (MDC) is a video encoding technique that presents interesting features when applied to P2P video streaming system, e.g., it eases the management of variable bandwidth/throughput by transmitting a suitable number of descriptions, it provides high resilience to packet losses improving decoded video quality as the peer connecting probability increases. The literature shows that MDC could be an effective approach to realize effective P2P networks for video streaming. In fact a key issue in video streaming is the problem of error-recovery at the decoder side, i.e., the error-concealment (EC) strategy. The main contribution of this paper is the design of a sequence-based EC algorithm that performs the error-recovery by using the information coming from a certain number of frames in the future to minimize the effect of error propagation. Target of this work is to apply such EC strategy to a balanced MDC system. Simulation results show the great improvement that a sequence-based EC algorithm gives to the system performance compared to common EC approaches.