Packet prioritizing and delivering for multimedia streaming

Abstract

In this thesis, we investigated the problems of prioritizing and delivering packets in multimedia streaming. Under a lossy network, the sender has to decide which packets are to be further protected from losses, which packets are to be sent, how to send them, and when to send them. The priority of a packet could be either based on its position in the coding interdependencies (syntax-based), or on its semantic content (content-based). We studied these problems under different network scenarios, with different types of information available to the sender and found that significant quality improvements could be obtained if a good packet allocation, protection and/or scheduling scheme is employed. Besides, content-based prioritization could greatly improve the perceived quality compared to syntax-based prioritization.