TOPICS

Technical Program:

Registration:

ICASSP2000 Connections:

Tutorial 5: 13:30 - 17:00 Monday, June 5, 2000

Video over IP
by
M. Reha Civanlar (AT&T Labs - Research, USA)



Abstract

        By now, almost everyone who "surfed" the WWW experienced receiving some form of video over the Internet. Considering that the feasibility of packet video was an advanced research topic just a decade ago, it is not hard to believe that the Internet may become the main video distribution network of the very near future. Achieving this state at a reasonable cost however, is not effort free. The Internet is a heterogeneous collection of networks. Currently, it does not provide any quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees. Unavoidable packet losses and delay jitter caused by congestion make effective streaming of video over the Internet a challenging task. On the other hand, sending video signals in their entirety with the QoS guarantees may not be economically feasible.

     This tutorial will start with a discussion of the Internet video delivery impairments and review the possible remedies. The factors that make a compressed video stream easy to transport over the Internet will be discussed next. These are important in designing new codecs and in determining the proper usage of the existing ones. After a brief outline of the "lower" (IP, UDP, TCP) and "higher" (RTSP, SDP, SIP) layer Internet protocols that make the design of a complete communications system possible, the tutorial will focus on the "transport" layer. The current techniques for effective video transport over the Internet will be reviewed in detail through an investigation of selected video payload formats for the Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) including H.261, MJPEG, MPEG and H.263+.