Video Multicast Over Wireless Mesh Networks With Scalable Video Coding (SVC)

This paper addresses the problem of rate allocation for video multicast over wireless mesh networks. An optimization framework is established to incorporate the effects of heterogeneity in wireless link capacities, traffic contention among neighboring links and different video Distortion-Rate (DR) characteristics. The authors present a distributed rate allocation scheme with the goal of minimizing total video distortion of all peers without excessive network utilization. The scheme relies on cross-layer information exchange between the MAC and application layers. It adopts the Scalable Video Coding (SVC) extensions of H.264/AVC for video rate adaptation, so that graceful quality reduction can be achieved at intermediate nodes within each multicast tree.