An analytical model for progressive mesh streaming

3D triangular mesh is becoming an increasingly important data type for networked applications such as digital museums, online games, and virtual worlds. In these applications, a multi-resolution representation is typically desired for streaming large 3D meshes, allowing for incremental rendering at the viewers while data is still being transmitted. Such progressive coding, however, introduces dependencies between data. This paper quantitatively analyzes the effects of such dependency on the intermediate decoded mesh quality when the progressive mesh is transmitted over a lossy network, by modeling the distribution of decoding time as a function of mesh properties and network parameters. To illustrate the usefulness of our analytical model, we describe three of its applications. First, we show how it can be used to analytically compute the expected decoded mesh quality. Second, we study two extreme cases of dependency in progressive mesh and show that the effect of dependencies on decoded mesh quality diminishes with time. Finally, based on the model, we propose a packetization strategy that improves the decoded mesh quality during the initial stage of streaming.