Media scaling for audiovisual communication with the Heidelberg transport system

Abstract

HeiTS, the Heidelberg Transport System, is a multimedia communication system for real-time delivery of digital audio and video. HeiTS operates on top of guaranteed-performance networks that apply resource reservation techniques. To make HeiTS also work with networks for which no reservation scheme can be realized (for example, Ethernet or existing internetworks), we implement an extension to HeiTS which performs media scaling at the transport level: The media encoding is modified according to the bandwidth available in the underlying networks. Both transparent and non-transparent scaling methods are examined. HeiTS lends itself to implement transparent temporal and spatial scaling of media streams. At the HeiTS interface, functions are provided which report information on the available resource bandwidth to the application so that non-transparent scaling methods may be used, too. Both a continuous and discrete scaling solution for HeiTS are presented. The continuous solution uses feedback messages to adjust the data flow. The discrete solution also exploits the multipoint network connection mechanism of HeiTS. Whereas the first method is more flexible, the second technique is better suited for multicast scenarios. The combination of resource reservation and media scaling seems to be particularly well-suited to meet the varying demands of distributed multimedia applications.