Optimized channel rate allocation for H.264/AVC scalable video multicast streaming over heterogeneous networks

We present an algorithm to optimize the allocation of channel bitrate to different network abstraction layer (NAL) units of the H.264/AVC scalable video bitstreams for real-time multicast streaming over heterogeneous networks. We focus on the problem of achieving a high robustness of video streaming under varying channel conditions in terms of the reconstructed video qualities at different users. As an extension of our previous work for unicast streaming, the proposed algorithm can achieve an optimized allocation of channel bitrate for multicast streaming with any user distribution. Our simulations show that a good performance on the video qualities among the multicast users can be achieved for different user distributions. A gain in terms of the overall multicast PSNR can be achieved against the protection strategies targeting at users with medium channel qualities in our experiments.