Large-scale, widespread distribution of high definition multimedia
contents using IP networks is extremely resource intensive. Service providers have to employ an expensive network of servers, routers, link infrastructures and set-top boxes to accommodate the generated traffic. The goal in this paper is to develop network-aware media communication solutions that help service providers to efficiently utilize their deployed network infrastructures for media delivery. In particular, we investigate the following fundamental problem: given a fixed network infrastructure, what is the best strategy to multicast multiple multimedia contents from a set of server nodes to a set of clients, to realize the best reconstruction quality at the client nodes? We use rate-distortion to formalize the notion of media quality and to formulate the corresponding optimization problem.
We show that current approaches in which multimedia
compression and network delivery mechanisms
are designed separately are inherently suboptimal. Thus,
better utilization of network resources requires a joint
consideration of media compression and network delivery.
We develop one such approach based on optimized
delivery of balanced Multiple Description Codes (MDC),
in which the MDC itself is also optimized with respect to
the optimized delivery strategy. Simulation results are
reported, verifying that our solution can significantly
outperform existing, layered, solutions. As a byproduct,
our solutions introduces a fundamentally different use of
MDC. Up until now, MDC has been adopted to combat
losses, mostly in packet lossy networks. We show that
MDC is an efficient tool for network communication,
even in error-free networks. In particular MDC, when
properly duplicated at routers, can exploit the rich topological
structures in networks to maximize the utilization
of the network resources, beyond conventional coding
techniques.
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