Performance Evaluation and Parameter Optimization of SoftCast Wireless Video Broadcast

Abstract

Wireless video broadcast plays an important role in multimedia communication with the emergence of mobile video applications. However, conventional video broadcast designs suffer from a cliff effect due to separated source and channel encoding. The newly proposed SoftCast scheme employs a cross-layer design, whose reconstructed video quality is proportional to the channel condition. In this paper, we provide the performance evaluation and the parameter optimization of the SoftCast system. Optimization principles on parameter selection are suggested to obtain a better video quality, occupy less bandwidth and/or utilize lower complexity. In addition, we compare SoftCast with H.264 in the LTE EPA scenario. The simulation results show that SoftCast provides a better performance in the scalability to channel conditions and the robustness to packet losses.

Temporal information based GoP adaptation for linear video delivery schemes

“…In most of the linear video transmission related works, only a fixed GoP-size usually equal to 8 or 16 frames is used for performance assessment. Although some works have already mentioned that adapting the GoP-size may improve the received quality [13,18], to the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to propose an adaptive GoPsize coding scheme for SoftCast that takes into account the characteristics of the video content. Specifically, we propose an Adaptive GoP-size mechanism based on Content and Cut detection for SoftCast (AGCC-SoftCast), which takes into account the temporal fluctuations of the video.…”

“…Although the trade-off between GoP-size and complexity cost for SoftCast was briefly discussed in [18], no proposal was made to find an optimal GoP-size according to the transmitted content. By optimal, we mean the GoP-size that optimizes the trade-off between received quality and complexity cost.…”