Adaptive quality control for multimedia communications

Abstract

Multimedia communications are communications with several types of media, such as audio, video and data. The current Internet has some levels of capability to support multimedia communications, unfortunately, the QoS (Quality of Service) is still challenging. A large number of QoS mechanisms has been proposed; however, the main concern is for low levels, e.g. layer 2 (Data Link) or 3 (Transport). In this paper, mechanisms for control the quality of audio and video are proposed. G.723.1 and MPEG-4 are used as the audio and video codec respectively. The proposed algorithm for adaptive quality control of audio communication is based on forward error correction (FEC). In the case of video communication, the proposed algorithm adapts the value of key frame interval, which is an encoding parameter of MPEG-4. We evaluated our proposed algorithms by computer simulation. We have shown that, in most cases, the proposed scheme gained a higher throughput compared to other schemes.

Keywords

• Adaptive
• multimedia communications
• quality control
• FEC
• MPEG-4