Seamless handover between unicast and multicast multimedia streams  

作　　者：Mau-Luen THAM Chee-Onn CHOW Yi-han XU Khong Neng CHOONG Cheng Suan LEE 

机构地区：[1]Department of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Malaya [2]College of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing Forestry University [3]Wireless Communication Cluster, MIMOS Berhad,Kuala Lumpur 57000, Malaysia [4]Power-All Networks, Jalan Ampang,Kuala Lumpur 50450, Malaysia

出　　处：《Journal of Zhejiang University-Science C(Computers and Electronics)》2014年第10期929-942,共14页浙江大学学报C辑（计算机与电子（英文版）

基　　金：Project supported by the Ministry of Science,Technology and Innovation under the eScienceFund(No.01-01-03-SF0782);MIMOS Berhad

摘　　要：With the deployment of heterogeneous networks, mobile users are expecting ubiquitous connectivity when using applications. For bandwidth-intensive applications such as Internet Protocol Television(IPTV), multimedia contents are typically transmitted using a multicast delivery method due to its bandwidth efficiency. However, not all networks support multicasting. Multicasting alone could lead to service disruption when the users move from a multicast-capable network to a non-multicast network. In this paper, we propose a handover scheme called application layer seamless switching(ALSS) to provide smooth real-time multimedia delivery across unicast and multicast networks. ALSS adopts a soft handover to achieve seamless playback during the handover period. A real-time streaming testbed is implemented to investigate the overall handover performance, especially the overlapping period where both network interfaces are receiving audio and video packets. Both the quality of service(QoS) and objective-mapped quality of experience(QoE) metrics are measured. Experimental results show that the overlapping period takes a minimum of 56 and 4 ms for multicast-to-unicast(M2U) and unicast-to-multicast(U2M) handover, respectively. The measured peak signal-to-noise ratio(PSNR) confirms that the frame-by-frame quality of the streamed video during the handover is at least 33 dB, which is categorized as good based on ITU-T recommendations. The estimated mean opinion score(MOS) in terms of video playback smoothness is also at a satisfactory level.With the deployment of heterogeneous networks, mobile users are expecting ubiquitous connectivity when using applications. For bandwidth-intensive applications such as Interact Protocol Television （IPTV）, multimedia contents are typical- ly transmitted using a multicast delivery method due to its bandwidth efficiency. However, not all networks support multicasting. Multicasting alone could lead to service disruption when the users move from a multicast-capable network to a non-multicast network. In this paper, we propose a handover scheme called application layer seamless switching （ALSS） to provide smooth real-time multimedia delivery across unicast and multicast networks. ALSS adopts a soft handover to achieve seamless playback during the handover period. A real-time streaming testbed is implemented to investigate the overall handover performance, espe- cially the overlapping period where both network interfaces are receiving audio and video packets. Both the quality of service （QoS） and objective-mapped quality of experience （QoE） metrics are measured. Experimental results show that the overlapping period takes a minimum of 56 and 4 ms for multicast-to-unicast （M2U） and unicast-to-multicast （U2M） handover, respectively. The measured peak signal-to-noise ratio （PSNR） confirms that the frame-by-frame quality of the streamed video during the handover is at least 33 dB, which is categorized as good based on ITU-T recommendations. The estimated mean opinion score （MOS） in terms of video playback smoothness is also at a satisfactory level.

关 键 词：Experimental approach Multimedia session continuity Seamless handover Unicast/multicast switching Multimedia streaming 

分 类 号：TN929.5[电子电信—通信与信息系统]