Dynamic and interoperable adaptation of SVC for QoS-enabled streaming

Seamless streaming of multimedia content that ensures Quality of Service (QoS) over heterogeneous networks has been a desire for many multimedia services, for which the multimedia contents should be adapted to usage environments such as network characteristics, terminal capabilities, and user preferences. Scalability in video coding is a good feature to meet the requirement of heterogeneous networks. Currently, the Joint Video Team (JVT) of the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) is standardizing a new scalable video coding standardization, called as SVC, which will become an extension to H.264/MPEG-4 AVC. In this paper, we propose a dynamic adaptation scheme of SVC bit-stream using the MPEG-21 Digital Item Adaptation (DIA) tool. MPEG-21 DIA framework provides systematic solutions in choosing the optimal adaptation operation to given conditions and supports interoperable video adaptation. The experiment results showed that the proposed adaptation scheme provides QoS-enabled delivery and consumption of SVC with time-varying constraints of network, terminal, and user preference, in a robust and efficient way. In addition, session mobility, in which a session is movable from one type of device to another type of device, was performed using switching spatial layer of SVC stream'.