User-perceived quality-aware adaptive delivery of MPEG-4 content

Many adaptive delivery mechanisms have been devised for streaming multimedia over best-effort IP networks. Most of these adaptive schemes do not consider the user's perception of quality when making adaptations. We propose that an optimum adaptation trajectory exists which indicates how encoding quality should be adapted (upgraded/downgraded) with respect to user perceived quality in response to network conditions. This optimum adaptation trajectory can be used with any transmission adaptation policy. We describe a system architecture that uses knowledge of user perceived quality to make adaptation decisions and give an example of how this knowledge can be used to complement the sender-based adaptation algorithm, LDA.