  The significant increase of the transmission of multimedia content over
Internet are demanded new delivery strategies to assure a good quality of
experience of the users. Transmission of video over packet networks is not an
easy task due to multiple fluctuations of the network conditions. One
possibility to improve the quality of some video streaming services is the
combinate use of the scalable video coding and cross layer mechanisms that
allow applications to adapt its traffic stream to the resources network that
are available. In this paper, it is presented a performance evaluation of the
three main scalability techniques: CGS (Coarse-Grained Scalability), FGS (Fine
Grain scalability) and MGS (Medium Grain Scalability). In particular, we focus
on determining what method is more appropriated for video transmission taking
into account some video quality metrics like PSNR (Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio)
and decoded frame rate. The results reveal that the rate-adaptive strategy and
the MGS technique help avoid or reduce the congestion in networks obtaining a
better quality in the received videos.
