Implementation and Evaluation of Video-Quality Adjustment for Heterogeneous Video Multicast

By introducing video-quality adaptation mechanisms into intermediate network equipments using active network technologies, we can provide users with video distribution services taking into account client heterogeneity in terms of available bandwidth, performance of client systems, and user’s preferences about video quality. In this paper, we implement the low-pass filter, a quality adjustment technique for real-time multicasting of MPEG-2 video, on an Intel IXP1200 network processor-based network node. We applied the filter to video streams passing through the node and evaluated its practicality and applicability in term of accuracy of video rate adaptation, variation of video quality, and filtering throughput. From the result of evaluation experiments, we demonstrate that the implemented video-quality adjustment mechanism has sufficient rate adaptation capability, and that the low-pass filter is able to accelerate with parallel processing.