IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS FOR VIDEO TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 20, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2010 1255
Transactions Letters
A Delivery System for Streaming Video Over DiffServ Networks
Lishui Chen and Guizhong Liu
Abstract—In this letter, we develop a general delivery system
for streaming using various coding standards over DiffServ (DS)
networks. In the delivery system, the coder at the application
layer pre-marks the compressed data according to their impor-
tance in terms of the current configuration and characteristics
of the coder. Then the system maps these pre-marks to a fixed
number of source marks at the real-time transport protocol layer.
In terms of the current network congestion state, the edge router
of a DS network uses the improved two rate three color maker
to map these source marks to differentiated services code points.
At last, the core routers transmit these packets according to the
per-hop forwarding behaviors. Experimental results show that
this system can greatly improve the end-to-end delivery quality
of a streaming application.
Index Terms—DiffServ (DS) networks, improved two rate three
color maker (ITRTCM), pre-marking, QoS, two markers system.
I. Introduction
With the rapid development of multimedia applications over
the Internet, such as distant learning, video conference, voice
over Internet protocol, video on demand (VoD), and so on,
new broadband technologies have been developed extensively
in these years. But with the fast increase of network users,
especially the multimedia users, the issue of bandwidth lack is
still a major problem in streaming applications. So, the Internet
Engineering Task Force has been proposed the integrated
services (IntServ) [1] and the differentiated services (DiffServ)
[2] to provide end-to-end quality of service (QoS). DiffServ
(DS) network is more attractive for its simplicity and scalabil-
ity because it never provides signaled QoS for individual flows
as IntServ, but provides static QoS to traffic aggregation.
In order to use the DS architecture in a better way, a
lot of researchers have proposed media-aware application-
level marking schemes, which mark the packets according
to their importance measured in terms of some special rules
and map these source marks to differentiated services code
Manuscript received August 12, 2008; revised January 15, 2009 and July
31, 2009. Date of publication July 12, 2010; date of current version September
9, 2010. This work was supported in part by the National 863 Program
under Project 2009AA01Z409, by the National 973 Project under Project
2007CB311002, and by the National Natural Science Foundation of China
(NSFC) under Project 60972066. This paper was recommended by Associate
Editor T. Nguyen.
The authors are with the School of Electronic and Information Engi-
neering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, Shaanxi 710049, China (e-mail:
liugz@xjtu.edu.cn; chenls@mail.xjtu.edu.cn).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available
online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TCSVT.2010.2056970
points (DSCPs) [3], [4]. However, as in [6], there is no
policing algorithm involved at the DS domain edge to check
the packets’ importance, and the importance indication of a
packet may be disregarded if legacy packet markers, such as
two rate three color marker (TRTCM), is used [5]. Then two
markers delivery system are proposed in [6]–[8] with a source
marker at the application layer to pre-mark the video packets
to certain source marks and a special edge router marker to
mark the packets at the DS edge according to the current
network congestion state. However, there exist various video
coders, with different characteristics having great impact on
the importance of their compressed data. And the network is
a shared medium, in which it is very difficult to design one
particular edge router marker for each coder. So, in this letter,
we will propose a general two markers delivery system for
streaming applications, which pre-marks importance indices
of compressed data at coding in the application layer, maps
those importance indices to different source marks according
to a simple rule, and marks those packets to DSCPs using
improved two rate three color maker (ITRTCM) at the DS
domain edge in terms of the current network condition. In
this system, streaming applications run over real-time transport
protocol (RTP) and all those packets having extended RTP
headers record the source marks of the video packets. At last,
the core routers in the DS domains deliver those packets to
the egress routers on the paths of video packets according
to per-hop forwarding behaviors corresponding to their drop
precedence. After several hops of DS domains, delivery of
those video packets at last arrive at their destination.
The remainder of this letter is organized as follows. The
delivery system is presented in Section II, which involves two
examples of pre-marking scheme, the uniform source-marking
scheme, and ITRTCM. The simulation and its experimental
results are presented and discussed in Section III. A brief
conclusion is given in Section IV.
II. General Two Markers Delivery System
A. General Source Marking Scheme
The general source marking scheme consists of two steps.
First, when coding a video sequence (VS) with a special coder,
we should measure the importance of a block of data to be
compressed and pre-mark it with one of the K importance
grades in accordance with the coder used. Second, we should
map the K importance grades to L marks and L will be used
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