Abstract
Bandwidth variations is one of the major problems in providing QoS guaranteed services for the current Internet users. The FGS coding scheme is considered an efficient and effective solution to solving the bandwidth variation problem. However, its coding efficiency is significantly lower than the nonscalable coder when the supporting bit-rate range is wide. Streaming video with multiple-bitstream switching may provide a more efficient solution for rate adaptation for users with a large degree of heterogeneity than using a single bitstream. In this paper, we propose a receiver-driven drift-compensated switching method for rate adaptation in heterogeneous video multicasting applications. Our proposed method can achieve significant performance improvement in case of packet loss or network congestion.