Optimized congestion aware and rate-adaptive multimedia communication for application in fragile environment during disaster management and recovery

Delivery of multimedia content over network has always been given vital importance since its inception. Different models for content delivery have been proposed with respect to multiple factors like bandwidth, quality of content, importance, and delivery method, etc. In this paper, we propose a Hyper Text Transfer Protocol-based rate adaptive transcoding and streaming technique that maintains its multimedia streaming quality, especially when network grows congested and fragile during Disaster Management and Recovery operations. The proposed solution provides users high-quality audio and video contents even when network resources are limited and fragile. We developed a real-time test bed that can deliver high-quality streaming videos by transcoding the original video in real time to a scalable codec, which allows streaming adaptation according to network dynamics. We also performed validation tests to ensure multimedia delivery in cloud computing, functionality on our hosted website for live communication between transmitter and receiver. From our experiments, we observed that the rate adaptive transcoding and streaming can efficiently deliver information services such as live multimedia in emergency and disasters under very low bandwidth environments.