With the rapid growth of wireless broadband technologies, such as WLAN and WiMAX, quality streaming video contents are available through portable devices anytime, anywhere. The layered multicast system using scalable video codecs has been proposed as an efficient architecture for video dissemination taking account of user and link diversities. However, in the wired/wireless combined best-effort based heterogeneous IP networks which provide more fluctuation in available bandwidth and end-to-end delay, the performance of streaming systems has been greatly degraded due to frequent packet loss, resulting from either wired congestion or wireless fading/shadowing. In this paper, we present a real-time embedded packet train probing scheme for estimating end-to-end available bandwidth so as to accomplish effective congestion and error control. This is facilitated by effective classification of packet loss sources, delay trend detection algorithm and flexible transmission rate of packets. Under the proper wireless channel modelling and estimation, our layered structure can allow appropriate subscription of video layers and adaptively insert necessary amount of forward error correction (FEC) packets so as to achieve QoS optimized system for scalable video multicasting.
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