Design of multichannel communication system of the MPEG video data streams using adaptive QoS control

This paper considers the stored MPEG video multi-channel transmission, and discusses the design of dynamic band assignment scheme considering the picture quality, together with the result of implementation. In the proposed scheme, the parameter representing the picture degradation characteristic of each video picture is used in numerical form, in the assignment of the band to the streams. By preparing the transmission schedule beforehand, which indicates the band assignment to the streams along the time-axis direction, the change of the picture degradation characteristic due to the scene changes in each stream is handled. There arises, however, the following problem. Since GOP (group of pictures) of the stream is not synchronized, the transmission following the schedule may become impossible, if the scene changes occur very frequently, due to the increase of the streams. From such a viewpoint, this paper proposes a scheme where the whole streams are partitioned into groups, and each group executes the independent transmission process. Furthermore, a method to estimate the optimal number of groups is proposed, which minimizes the picture degradation, based on the parameters, such as the average scene length and GOP length. Those control schemes are implemented on LAN and the transmission experiment is run on the stored MPEG video, and the effectiveness of the proposed band assignment method in the multichannel transmission is demonstrated. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn Pt 1, 87(10): 81–92, 2004; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ecja.10155