MPEG compliant joint source/channel coding using DCT and substream scheduling for packet networks

Abstract

QoS-guarantee in real-time communication for multimedia applications is significantly important. An architectural framework for multimedia networks based on substreams or flows is effectively exploited for combining source and channel coding for multimedia data. But the existing frame by frame approach which includes Moving Pictures Expert Group (MPEG) cannot be neglected because it is a standard. In this paper, firstly, we designed an MPEG transcoder which converts an MPEG coded stream into variable rate packet sequences to be used for our joint source/channel coding (JSCC) scheme. Secondly, we designed a classification scheme to partition the packet stream into multiple substreams which have their own Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. Finally, we designed a management (reservation and scheduling) scheme for substreams to support better perceptual video quality such as the bound of end-to-end jitter. We have shown that our JSCC scheme is better than two other popular techniques by simulation and real video experiments on the TCP/IP environment.