Wyner-Ziv Video Compression and Fountain Codes for Receiver-Driven Layered Multicast

The proliferation of video streaming applications that distribute data to a large number of clients motivates the design of fast and reliable multimedia delivery systems capable to adapt effectively to diverse transmission conditions. Receiver-driven layered multicast (RLM) efficiently addresses the issue of heterogeneity in clients’ available bandwidths and packet loss rates by shifting rate control to the receiver side. We propose a system for RLM over the Internet and 3G wireless networks based on layered Wyner-Ziv video coding and digital fountain coding. Layered Wyner-Ziv video coding resembles MPEG-4 FGS coding in terms of generating a base layer plus a scalable enhancement layer with good rate-distortion performance, but improves robustness to packet loss in the base layer. Digital fountain codes are near-capacity erasure codes that are ideally suited for multicast applications because of their rateless property. By combining an error-resilient Wyner-Ziv coder and rateless fountain codes, our system allows reliable real-time multicast of high-quality video to an arbitrary number of heterogeneous receivers without the requirement of feedback channels.