Adaptive Mobile Video Delivery Based on Fountain Codes and DASH: A Survey

摘要

Recent years have witnessed an explosive growth in mobile video-based services and efficient and reliable video delivery draws more and more attention. As a type of rateless codes, fountain codes can automatically adapt to wireless channel conditions with-out any knowledge of channels. This paper provides an overview of several typical Forward Error Correction (FEC) codes, such as Reed-Solomon (RS) code, Tornado code, Luby-Transform (LT) code, and Raptor code. We focus on a novel delay-aware fountain coding (DAF) technique that maximizes the code word length under the constraint of a given delay. Based on DAF, this paper also presents Unequal Error Protection DAF (UEP-DAF) which improves the Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) without additional co-ordination between the encoder and the decoder, as well as Model Predictive Control DAF (MPC-DAF) which reduces the compu-tational complexity to an affordable level for real-time video communications. Moreover, we review video streaming technologies, then introduce Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) and DASH over Multiple Content Distribution Servers (MCDS-DASH) in detail. Based on MCDS-DASH that adapts video bitrate at the block level to alleviate video fluctuation, we propose a novel approach to integrating fountain codes with MCDS-DASH, which is capable of achieving unprecedented high throughput.