Cooperative video streaming with dynamic compression at the terminal nodes

Media content distribution constitutes a growing share of the services on the Internet. In recent years methods for cooperative media distribution has been a research area with high activity. Concurrently wireless internet connections have emerged. Wireless connection technologies, e.g. Wimax, have properties which make them suboptimal for cooperative distribution. In particular, the asymmetric relationship between the uplink and the downlink bandwidth makes the cooperative distribution difficult. Today two distinct source coding approaches are used; Layered Coding (LC) and Multiple Description Coding (MDC). A promising concept, termed MDC with Conditional Compression (MDC-CC), has been proposed in [1]. MDC-CC essentially acts as an adaptive hybrid between LC and MDC and is particularly interesting when combined with cooperative distribution. In this paper a scheme utilizing the concept of MDC-CC is proposed. The functionality of the scheme has been described and performance estimates using different distributions of redundancy has revealed that the proposed scheme has great potential.