A Simple and Efficent Packet Marker System for Enhanced MPEG Video Delivery over DiffServ Networks

We propose a Two Markers System (TMS) to improve the delivery quality of MPEG video transmission. TMS places marker modules at both the video source and the edge of a DiffServ network to act at different levels of the video stream. The source marking modules act at the application level to set an importance indicator in the IP header of the MPEG frame packet by evaluating the contribution of the packet to the expected picture quality to be perceived by an end user. Meanwhile, at the edge of the DiffServ network, we propose the Enhanced Token Bucket Three Color Marker (ETBTCM) to perform packet marking at the network level in accordance with the pre-assigned importance of each video frame packet. We use authentic MPEG4 video traffic traces to compare the performance of the proposed TMS system with those of legacy packet markers. Results show that TMS outperforms the legacy traffic markers in terms of the quality of the delivered MPEG video stream while improving the use of network resources.