Title of Thesis Rate Adaptive Video Over IP Networks

Emmanuel A. Jammeh

Title of thesis Rate Adaptive Video over IP Networks

Position: Student

Degree registered : PhD

Duration of study October 2000- Now

Financial support (Association of Commonwealth Universities, Gambia Telecomms Company)

Supervisor (Professor M. Ghanbari)

Current affiliation (, , http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~eajamm, University of Essex)

Abstract

There has been a rapid increase in compressed video streaming applications over IP networks, notwithstanding its lack of QoS support. These applications have had to use the rudimentary UDP transport, which is not congestion controlled, and has to be complemented with congestion control algorithms since it depends on the best-effort delivery of IP. To do this effectively, such applications determine the network status, adaptively vary the bit rate of compressed video, and use a TCP-friendly congestion control scheme. The challenge is to adaptively vary the bit rate to follow changes in available network bandwidth to attain the highest possible video quality without a drastic or frequent change in quality. This work investigates the design and evaluation of an end-to-end architecture for unicast playback of stored compressed video over IP, by using video transcoding for effective, efficient and fast dynamic rate adaptation on the fly. Video transcoding in this research is defined as the further compression of compressed video to reduce the bit rate in response to available network bandwidth with minimum degradation of the picture quality. A tuneable fuzzy logic congestion control mechanism is used to control the sending rate, and exhibits a TCP-friendly behaviour. The architecture is extended with a bit rate-smoothing scheme that reduced rate burstiness and improved the efficiency.

Publications

Journal papers

E. Jammeh, M. Fleury, and M. Ghanbari, Smoothing

Transcoded {MPEG-1} Video Streams for Internet Transmission},

IEE Proceedings Vision, Image and Signal Processing,

151(4): 298-306, 2004.

G. Flores-Lucio, M. Paredes-Ferrare, E. Jammeh, M. Fleury,

and M. Reed, OPNET-Modeler and NS-2: Comparing the Accuracy

of Network Simulators for Packet-Level Analysis using a Network

Testbed, WSEAS Transactions on Computers, Issue 3, Volume 2, July

2003,pp. 700-707, ISBN 1109-2750, http://www.wseas.org.

Conference papers

E. Jammeh, M. Fleury, and M. Ghanbari, Smoothing

Transcoded {MPEG-1} for Efficient Transmission over Best-effort

IP Networks}, in {VIE2003}, University of Surrey, July 2003.

E. Jammeh and M. Ghanbari, Transmission of pre-encoded

video over best-effort IP Networks}, in 13th $ International

PacketVideo Workshop (PV2003), Nantes, France, 2003.

E. Jammeh and M. Ghanbari, Transporting Real-Time

Transcoded Video over the Internet using end-to-end control,

International PacketVideo Workshop (PV2002), USA, 2002.