Enhanced End-System Support for Multimedia Transmission over the Differentiated Services Network

Abstract

Proposed as a scalable solution to provide Quality of Service (QoS) networks, Differentiated Services (DiffServ) architecture enables service providers to offer each customer a range of services that are differentiated on the basis of performance. However, up to now little work discusses how to provide effective communication support for multimedia applications over the differentiated services network. In this paper we present a new enhanced communication approach at the end system to support distributed multimedia applications. Two new mechanisms are highlighted in our approach: enhanced communication stack to support differentiation within one flow, and the network-awareness provision for applications at the end system. Our approach improves the capability of both error resilience and flexible rate control for transmitting compressed multimedia bitstreams, particularly those using scalable coding technologies. We also develop an object-based video transmission system as an application instance to take advantage of the enhanced communication approach. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods.