With the rapid improvement in computer and network technologies in recent years, interactive multimedia applications have become possible on the Internet. However, due to the best-effort nature of the Internet, multimedia applications often suffer from delay, jitter and loss. Of these, loss, typically caused by network congestion, degrades th perceptual quality of videos streams the most. There are several technologies to recover from packet-loss in video streams, including retransmission and redundancy. Unfortunately, redundancy adds additional overhead, which may cause more network congestion, while retransmission adds additional delay, which also decreases perceptual quality. In this thesis, we propose a new technology for ameliorating the effects of loss by interleaving pieces of frames instead of whole frames. We hypothesize our approach will improve perceptual quality with a reasonable additional latency, while adding no extra overhead to the network. We will evaluate the possible benefits to perceptual quality with a user-study and the possible impact on network congestion with a network simulator.
See also:
Mark Claypool and Yali Zhu. Using Interleaving to Ameliorate the Effects of Packet Loss in a Video Stream, In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Multimedia Network Systems and Applications (MNSA), Providence, RI, USA, May 2003.