Robust scalable video multi-cast with multiple sources and inter-source network decoding in lossy networks

• Path diversity and inter-source network decoding improve transmission reliability.
• Paths are optimally selected to maximize video layers and their reliabilities.
• A number of transmitting sources depends on the QoS requirements of video layers.
• Inter-source network decoding enhances the robustness of scalable video multi-cast.

This paper presents a robust scalable video multi-cast scheme with source diversity and inter-source network decoding in lossy networks. The source diversity technique gives path diversity, providing a better quality of layered video transmission under hostile environments. For each source, an optimization formulation is set up to find the best transmission route of each transmitting video layer. The objectives of the formulation are to maximize the total information values of video layers reflecting the end-to-end video quality and transmission reliability. The source providing the best overall achievable data rate, which is the data rate destination can expect to receive from the transmission, is selected to be the primary source, while the rest will be secondary sources. When the Quality-of-Service (QoS) guarantees of some transmitting video layers cannot be fulfilled by the primary source, the secondary source with the best QoS parameters is selected to transmit the layers to destinations. The number of secondary sources used for transmissions is increased until the QoS guarantees of all transmitting video layers are satisfied or all network resources are utilized. Network coding is deployed to multi-cast video layers from the same source for efficient resource usage. Network coded data from different sources can be used to decode the transmitting video data. In other words, at each destination, it needs only a sufficient number of video packets from different sources to recover all transmitting video data. Simulations with different network topologies show the improvement in both objective and subjective qualities of layered video multi-cast under lossy environments.