A real-time video transport system for the best-effort Internet

It is a challenging problem to design an efficient real-time video transport system for the present best-effort Internet because of the strict bandwidth, loss and time constraints and the lack of quality of service (QoS) guarantees from the present IP networks. This paper presents an end-to-end system architecture based on the MPEG-4 Delivery Multimedia Integration Framework (DMIF) for transporting real-time live video over the Internet. The key features of the system include: (1) MPEG-4 DMIF-based terminal architecture; (2) combination of an end-to-end feedback control mechanism and a rate-adaptive encoding algorithm for the best use of the Internet; (3) a robust and efficient packetization scheme for the MPEG-4 bit-stream by using the resynchronization marker approach specified in the MPEG-4 standard; and (4) efficient error control algorithms adopted at the end systems for visual quality enhancement. Simulation and test results using the actual Internet showed that our system is capable of utilizing the available network resource and achieve good perceptual quality at the application level.