Sctp-based transmission of data-partitioned H.264 video

Abstract

H.264 is the most recent standard for video compression, achieving not only the highest compression efficiency but also providing network friendliness and error resiliency. Data partitioning is one of the very important error resilience features of H.264. With data partitioning, each video slice is encoded into three different units of data with different importance. The encoded partitions containing the most important information should be protected against transmission error to ensure good picture quality. By virtue of multistreaming and partial reliability property of Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP), we can set different priority or reliability levels for different data partitions. In this article, we investigate the impact of the loss of different partitions on picture quality. We present a comparative study of the possible solutions for transmission of H.264 video using SCTP, considering both partitioned and non-partitioned H.264 video. We demonstrate how reliability features of SCTP can be efficiently mapped to the error resiliency features of H.264 video.