A network-aware quality adaptation scheme for device collaboration service in home networks

In home networks, seamless networking and collaborative streaming-based multimedia content sharing have become challenging issues in providing QoS (Quality of Service) for its users with heterogeneous consumer electronic devices. In order to support the demands for QoS, recently SVC (Scalable Video Coding) scheme has attracted attention. However, existing schemes do not guarantee the quality of multimedia contents as these schemes do not consider the characteristics of the SVC encoding scheme. Moreover, they do not accurately estimate the available network bandwidth. To cope with these problems, this paper presents a simple but effective N-QA (Network-aware Quality Adaptation) scheme that can improve the quality of streaming contents in a device collaboration service. The proposed scheme quickly adjusts the data transmission rate according to the estimated available bandwidth of network. It also controls media quality using SVC characteristics. The experimental result shows that the proposed scheme can significantly improve the media quality.