Design and evaluation of novel scalability techniques for adaptation over heterogeneous networks

Abstract

This paper addresses the issues concerned with the provision of scalable video services over heterogeneous networks particularly with regards to dynamic adaptation and user’s acceptable quality of service. In order to provide and sustain an adaptive and network friendly multimedia communication service, a suite of techniques that achieved automatic scalability and adaptation are developed using H.264/AVC Extension codec platform. The objective, subjective and real time performances of the techniques are evaluated to assess the Quality of Service (QoS) provided to diverse users with variable constraints and dynamic resources. The techniques are further evaluated with view to establish their performance against state of the art scalable and none-scalable techniques. Several experiments and simulations revealed that the proposed techniques outperformed state-of- the-art and none-scalable(SL) techniques. The designed techniques provide an automated scalability adaptation on the video stream and showed up to 50% gain in scalability adaptation against single layer (SL) and none-combined scalability techniques.