This article is part of the series Selected Papers from MultiMedia Modeling Conference 2009.

Open Access Research Article

Rate Control Performance under End-User's Perspective: A Test Tool

Cristian Koliver1*, Jean-Marie Farines2, Barbara Busse3 and Hermann De Meer3

Author Affiliations

1 Center for Computing and Information Technology, University of Caxias do Sul, P.O. Box 1352, Caxias do Sul, Brazil

2 Department of Automation and Systems Engineering, Federal University of Santa Catarina, P.O. Box 476, Florianopolis, Brazil

3 Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Passau, Innstrae 43, 94032 Passau, Germany

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EURASIP Journal on Image and Video Processing 2010, 2010:524613 doi:10.1155/2010/524613


The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://jivp.eurasipjournals.com/content/2010/1/524613


Received:30 April 2009
Revisions received:9 November 2009
Accepted:19 January 2010
Published:8 April 2010

© 2010 The Author(s).

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The Internet has been experiencing a large growth of multimedia traffic of applications performing over an RTP stack implemented on top of UDP/IP. Since UDP does not offer a congestion control mechanism (unlike TCP), studies on the rate control schemes have been increasingly done. Usually, new proposals are evaluated, by simulation, in terms of criteria such as fairness towards competing TCP connections and packet losses. However, results related to other performance aspects—quality achieved, overhead introduced by the control, and actual throughput after stream adaptation—are difficult to obtain by simulation. In order to provide actual results about these criteria, we developed a comprehensive live video delivery tool for testing RTP-based controllers. In this version of the tool, the video is encoded on the fly in the MPEG-2 standard, but we intend to use the H.264/AVC standard as soon as common PC's provide enough processing power to encode H.264/AVC live video. The tool allows to easily incorporate new control schemes. In this paper, we describe the tool architecture and some implementation details. We also evaluate the performance of the tool itself, in terms of efficacy, accuracy, and efficiency.

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