A Practical RTP Packetization Scheme for SVC Video Transport over IP Networks

Scalable video coding (SVC) has been standardized as an extension of the H.264/AVC standard. This paper proposes a practical real-time transport protocol (RTP) packetization scheme to transport SVC video over IP networks. In combined scalability of SVC, a coded picture of a base or scalable enhancement layer is produced as one or more video layers consisting of network abstraction layer (NAL) units. The SVC NAL unit header contains a (DID, TID, QID) field to identify the association of each SVC NAL unit with its scalable enhancement layer without parsing the payload part of the SVC NAL unit. In this paper, we utilize the (DID, TID, QID) information to derive hierarchical spatio-temporal relationship of the SVC NAL units. Based on the derivation using the (DID, TID, QID) field, we propose a practical RTP packetization scheme for generating single RTP sessions in unicast and multicast transport of SVC video. The experimental results indicate that the proposed packetization scheme can be efficiently applied to transport SVC video over IP networks with little induced delay, jitter, and computational load.