Multirate multicast is a powerful methodology of multimedia communication in heterogenous networks. A variant of multirate multicast motivated by scalable multimedia streaming is layered multicast, where the transmitted signal is presented in successive data layers. With recent advances of network coding theory, many layered multicast schemes using network coding have been proposed to improve the performance of traditional routing-based layered multicast. They divide the network into different layers and construct a unirate multicast network code for each layer. However, these schemes do not perform network coding between data layers, and consequently cannot realize the full potential of network coding. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to layered multicast that allows network coding of data in different layers. This relaxation lends the proposed scheme greater flexibility in optimizing the data flow than previous layered solutions, and thus achieves higher throughput.

H.264 SVC extension, as the state of art scalable video coding standard, can offer a single code stream to serve diverse communication bandwidths and display resolutions. However, the rate-distortion performance of H.264 SVC is still inferior to the non-scalable H.264 AVC. To reduce the performance gap between H.264 SVC and H.264 AVC, we propose a model-based adaptive resolution upconversion algorithm to improve the precision of the H.264 SVC inter-layer prediction. The new algorithm treats the up-sampling of video frames as an inverse problem of initial H.264 SVC down-sampling operation, and it significantly improves the performance of current H.264 SVC by optimally reversing the down-sampling filter.

It is shown that binary low-density generator matrix codes can achieve the rate-distortion bound of discrete memoryless sources with general distortion measure via multilevel quantization. A practical encoding scheme based on the survey-propagation algorithm is proposed. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is verified through simulation.

Multirate multicast is a powerful methodology of multimedia communication in heterogenous networks. A variant of multirate multicast motivated by scalable multimedia streaming is layered multicast, where the transmitted signal is presented in successive data layers. With recent advances of network coding theory, many layered multicast schemes using network coding have been proposed to improve the performance of traditional routing based layered multicast. They divide the network into different layers and construct a unirate multicast network code for each layer. However, these schemes do not perform network coding between data layers, and consequently cannot realize the full potential of network coding. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to layered multicast that allows network coding of data in different layers. This relaxation lends the proposed scheme greater flexibility in optimizing the data flow than previous layered solutions, and thus achieves higher throughput.

Efficient delivery scheme for multimedia content is critical for the quality of various multimedia network services. It has been shown that the joint design of the source coding techniques and network communication strategies for multimedia streaming can outperform the traditional separate design in a rate-distortion measure. In this paper, we show that current joint design framework in which a data flow optimization followed by a balanced multiple description coding (MDC) can be further improved by allowing more general MDC techniques. A new general MDC construction algorithm is proposed, and the simulation results show a significant performance improvement over the previous balanced MDC based algorithm.

Multirate multicast is a powerful methodology of multimedia communication in heterogenous networks. With recent advances of network coding theory, many multirate multicast techniques using network coding have been proposed and they hold promises of improving information multicast efficiency over the traditional application-layer multicast protocols. However, all these network coding based multirate multicast solutions adopted a layered coding technique and involves computationally expensive optimization to decide the amount of information transmitted in each multicast layer. In this paper, we propose a novel multirate multicast framework for lossy networks, which uses both the uneven erasure protection (UEP) technique and linear network codes. The new multicast framework not only simplifies the construction of the multicast codes, but also guarantees the strict fairness among clients of different bandwidths.