Middleware for streaming 3D progressive meshes over lossy networks

Abstract

Streaming 3D graphics have been widely used in multimedia applications such as online gaming and virtual reality. However, a gap exists between the zero-loss-tolerance of the existing compression schemes and the lossy network transmissions. In this article, we propose a generic 3D middleware between the 3D application layer and the transport layer for the transmission of triangle-based progressively compressed 3D models. Significant features of the proposed middleware include. 1) handling 3D compressed data streams from multiple progressive compression techniques. 2) considering end user hardware capabilities for effectively saving the data size for network delivery. 3) a minimum cost dynamic reliable set selector to choose the transport protocol for each sublayer based on the real-time network traffic. Extensive simulations with TCP/UDP and SCTP show that the proposed 3D middleware can achieve the dual objectives of maintaining low transmission delay and small distortion, and thus supporting high quality 3D streaming with high flexibility.