STAGGERCASTING WITH HIERARCHICAL CODING INFORMATION

摘要

In the transmission of streams of data, such as coded video, staggercasting, in which a primary and a secondary stream are transmitted at some relative time offset (i.e., "staggered"), allows a receiver to pre-buffer frames of the secondary stream to replace frames of the primary stream that may have been lost in transmission. In an illustrative implementation, staggercasting is performed in which the secondary stream contains a subset of the coded video frames transmitted in the primary stream. The primary stream contains non-disposable frames, which are essential to properly decoding the video data, as well as disposable frames which are not. The secondary stream, however, contains copies of the non-disposable frames and may contain copies of some of the disposable frames or no disposable frames at all. When frames in the primary stream are lost, such an arrangement will allow reconstruction at the receiver of a high quality video stream using the frames in the secondary stream. The determination of which frames to include in the secondary stream will depend on their importance as determined by the coding scheme with which they were generated.