Hardware-Assisted, Low-Cost Video Transcoding Solution in Wireless Networks

Abstract

Wireless video streaming has become an extremely popular application in recent years. Internet video streaming to mobile devices, however, faces several challenges, e.g., unstable wireless connections, long latency, high jitter and etc. Bitrate adaptive streaming and video transcoding solutions are widely used to address the above-mentioned issues, however, there are still several shortcomings of these approaches. Such challenges hinder providing satisfactory quality of video streaming service to the mobile users. We propose a hardware-assisted, real-time video transcoding solution implemented on a commercial off-the-shelf device, Raspberry Pi. We employ the software and hardware coupled architecture in order to improve the performance/quality of video streaming and enhance the user satisfactions in wireless network. Our video transcoding solution can be applied to both the downlink and uplink streaming: for downlink stream, it can provide agile bitrate adaptation to sudden network dynamics and enhance video quality by running our transcoding solution at the wireless edge. It can be used to uplink stream for broadcasting live streams in real-time. We present the design and implementation of our video transcoding system in both cases with practical scenarios. The evaluation results reveal that our transcoding solution enhances the performance of video streaming compared with other adaptive bitrate streamings and it provides higher video quality without causing rebuffering or video stall. We bridge the gap between the wireless channel capacity and the video quality while providing a better streaming experience to end user.