Rate-distortion efficient video transmission from multiple servers
We address the problem of streaming video efficiently from mUl­ tiple servers in a distributed manner. Invoking a scalable video encoding format, we describe a network-friendly , rate-distortion efficient distributed streaming algorithm based on a robust dis­ tributed encoding paradigm. The algorithm is efficiently matched dynamically to both the video content and the network channel conditions. Due to t he d iversity effect of multiple servers, our dis­ tributed algorithm is immune to single points of failure, provides natural load-balancing of the multiple servers and a graceful degra­ dation in quality with an Increase in multi-server load or a decrease in network throughput. We present the results of our Internet ex­ periments that validate our hypotheses.