Respond to a Cisco request for a proposal

Project ID:

RFP-2007-010

Title:

Adaptive Error Measurement, Concealment, and Repair for IP Streaming Video

Summary:

Streaming Video, including high-quality commercial distribution in standard and high definition formats, is rapidly moving to an IP infrastructure. In the process of re-hosting such video distribution on IP comes the opportunity to revisit the appropriate mechanisms for error measurement, error concealment, and error repair. Research areas include assessment/measurement of existing error repair techniques, and the creation of new adaptive, and/or hybrid techniques.

Full Description:

Streaming Video, including high-quality commercial distribution in standard and high definition formats, is rapidly moving to an IP infrastructure. In the process of re-hosting such video distribution on IP comes the opportunity to revisit the appropriate mechanisms for error measurement, error concealment, and error repair. IPTV systems are already employing some primitive error repair techniques, such as retransmissions and packet-level FEC (forward error correction).

It is our belief that simple application of single repair mechanisms may be inadequate to provide attractive tradeoffs in bandwidth usage, server capacity, and client processing. We are interested in research related to both the assessment/measurement of existing error repair techniques, and the creation of new techniques, particularly methods which are adaptive and/or utilize hybrids of the simple mechanisms.

Some specific areas of interest include:

1. How does one model the tradeoffs among error concealment, retransmission and FEC-based error repair techniques?
2. How does one combine multiple techniques to produce optimal repair of errors arising from different error processes (e.g. individual link errors, burst errors, correlated errors up-tree in a multicast distribution, outages dues to routing instabilities, etc.)?
3. What kind of instrumentation is needed to assess the effectiveness of such systems?
4. How does one ensure scalability of hybrid/adaptive systems to hundreds-of-thousands to millions of simultaneous receivers?

Proposals for both short-term applied/experimental projects, and longer term architectural or algorithmic research will be welcome.

Constraints and other information:

IPR will stay with the University. Cisco expects customary scholarly dissemination of results, and hopes that promising results would be made available to the community without limiting licenses, royalties, or other encumbrances.

Proposal submission:

Please use the link below to submit a proposal for research responding to this RFP. After a preliminary review, we may ask you to revise and resubmit your proposal.

Create/submit a proposal for this RFP

RFPs may be withdrawn as research proposals are funded, or interest in the specific topic is satisfied. Researchers should plan to submit their proposals as soon as possible. Submissions-to-date are reviewed at the beginning of each quarter (the first business day of: January, April, July, October).

Questions? Contact: research@cisco.com