Exploring the Delay versus Quality Tradeoff in Real-Time Streaming of Scalable Video from Mobile Devices

This work addresses the increasingly common case of a user who wants to record a video with a mobile device and share it in (near) real-time with other users in the Internet using HTTP streaming. The proposed system builds on scalable video coding (SVC) to provide some degrees of adaptation to the users watching the video without the support of a costly high-performance low-latency video transcoding server. At the same time, the DASH standard is used to leverage the scalable video for providing HTTP streaming adaptation to users watching the video. The performance of several chunk uploading strategies are investigated by simulations, evaluating the tradeoff between several parameters such as video quality, buffering rate, idle time, and the startup delay of the clients. Finally, experimental results on a testbed confirm the simulation results.