FEC Recovery Performance for Video Streaming Services Based on H.264/SVC

Abstract

With the recent advancement of video coding techniques and wide spread use of broadband networks, video streaming services over the Internet have attracted considerable attention. The recent video streaming services cover multimedia messaging, video telephony, video conferencing, standard and high-definition TV broadcasting, and those services are provided over wired/wireless networks (Schwarz et al. 2007). The Internet, however, is a best-effort network, and hence the quality of service (QoS) for video streaming is not strictly guaranteed due to packet loss and/or delay. The varying connection quality of the Internet has accelerated the development of adaptive mechanisms of video coding technologies. MPEG and H.26x are video coding standards which have been widely deployed. MPEG4’s latest video codec is Part 10 or the advanced video codec (AVC), which is also identically standardized as ITU H.264 (Marpe et al. 2006). The fundamental coding mechanism of H.264/AVC consists of a Video Coding Layer (VCL) and a Network Abstraction Layer (NAL). The VCL generates a coded representation of a source content, and the resulting data is formatted with header information by the NAL. Pictures are partitioned into small coding units called macroblocks, which organized by the following three slices: