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Video streaming and other multimedia applications account for an ever increasing proportion of all network traffic. The
recent adoption of High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) as the H.265 standard provides many opportunities for new
and improved services multimedia services and applications in the consumer domain. Since the delivery of version one
of H.265, the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding have been working towards standardisation of a scalable
extension (SHVC) to the H.265 standard and a series of range extensions and new profiles. As these enhancements are
added to the standard the range of potential applications and research opportunities will expend. For example the use of
video is also growing rapidly in other sectors such as safety, security, defence and health with real-time high quality
video transmission playing an important role in areas like critical infrastructure monitoring and disaster management.
Each of which may benefit from the application of enhanced HEVC/H.265 and SHVC capabilities.
The majority of existing research into HEVC/H.265 transmission has focussed on the consumer domain addressing
issues such as broadcast transmission and delivery to mobile devices with the lack of freely available tools widely cited
as an obstacle to conducting this type of research. In this paper we present a toolset which facilitates the transmission
and evaluation of HEVC/H.265 and SHVC encoded video on the popular open source NCTUns simulator. Our toolset
provides researchers with a modular, easy to use platform for evaluating video transmission and adaptation proposals on
large scale wired, wireless and hybrid architectures. The toolset consists of pre-processing, transmission, SHVC
adaptation and post-processing tools to gather and analyse statistics. It has been implemented using HM15 and SHM5,
the latest versions of the HEVC and SHVC reference software implementations to ensure that currently adopted
proposals for scalable and range extensions to the standard can be investigated.
We demonstrate the effectiveness and usability of our toolset by evaluating SHVC streaming and adaptation to meet
terminal constraints and network conditions in a range of wired, wireless, and large scale wireless mesh network
scenarios, each of which is designed to simulate a realistic environment. Our results are compared to those for
H264/SVC, the scalable extension to the existing H.264/AVC advanced video coding standard.
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