TCP-friendly Internet video streaming employing variable frame-rate encoding and interpolation

Abstract

A feedback-based Internet video transmission scheme based on ITU-T H.263+ is presented. The proposed system is capable of continually accommodating its stream size and managing the packet loss recovery in response to network condition changes. It consists of multiple components: TCP-friendly end-to-end congestion control and available bandwidth estimation, encoding frame-rate control and delay-based smoothing at the sender, media-aware packetization and packet loss recovery tied with congestion control, and quality recovery tools such as motion-compensated frame interpolation at the receiver. These components are designed to meet the low computational complexity requirement so that the whole system can operate in real-time. Among these, the video-aware congestion control known as a receiver-based congestion control mechanism, the variable frame-rate H.263+ encoding, and fast motion-compensated frame interpolation components are key features. Through a seamless integration, it is demonstrated that network adaptivity is enhanced enough to mitigate the packet loss and bandwidth fluctuation, resulting in a more smooth video experience at the receiver.