Performance Evaluation of H.264 Mapping Strategies over IEEE 802.11e WLAN for Robust Video Streaming

In this paper we propose several mapping schemes for streaming video generated by state–of–the–art H.264 codec over IEEE 802.11e enabled wireless LANs. The schemes take advantage of both 802.11e’s QoS mechanism and some novel features of the H.264 codec, so as to protect the most important information in terms of visual quality and reduce distortion under network congestion. The proposed methods are evaluated by means of the H.264 reference software codec, network simulation, and objective video quality measurements. Results show that the proposed methods achieve a robust and error resilient H.264 video streaming over wireless LANs than traditional best–effort streaming.