Optimal PET Protection for Streaming Scalably Compressed Video Streams With Limited Retransmission Based on Incomplete Feedback

Abstract

For streaming scalably compressed video streams over unreliable networks, Limited-Retransmission Priority Encoding Transmission (LR-PET) outperforms PET remarkably since the opportunity to retransmit is fully exploited by hypothesizing the possible future retransmission behavior before the retransmission really occurs. For the retransmission to be efficient in such a scheme, it is critical to get adequate acknowledgment from a previous transmission before deciding what data to retransmit. However, in many scenarios, the presence of a stochastic packet delay process results in frequent late acknowledgements, while imperfect feedback channels can impair the server's knowledge of what the client has received. This paper proposes an extended LR-PET scheme, which optimizes PET-protection of transmitted bitstreams, recognizing that the received feedback information is likely to be incomplete. Similar to the original LR-PET, the behavior of future retransmissions is hypothesized in the optimization objective of each transmission opportunity. As the key contribution, we develop a method to efficiently derive the effective recovery probability versus redundancy rate characteristic for the extended LR-PET communication process. This significantly simplifies the ultimate protection assignment procedure. This paper also demonstrates the advantage of the proposed strategy over several alternative strategies.