Congestion Resiliency for Data-Partitioned H.264/AVC Video Streaming Over IEEE 802.11e Wireless Networks

*Ismail Ali, Sandro Moiron, Martin Fleury and Mohammed Ghanbari University of Essex, Colchester CO4 3SQ, United Kingdom ABSTRACT This paper considers the impact of data partitioning form on wireless network access control and proposes a selective dropping scheme based on dropping the partition carrying intra-coded macroblocks. Data partitioning is an error resiliency technique that allows unequal error protection for transmission over ‘lossy’ channels. Including a per-picture, cyclic intra-refresh macroblock line guards against temporal error propagation. The paper shows that, by this scheme, when congestion occurs, it is possible to gain up to 2 dB in video quality over assigning a stream to a single IEEE 802.11e access category. The scheme is shown to be consistently advantageous in indoor and outdoor wireless scenarios over other ways of assigning the partitioned data packets to different access categories. This counter-intuitive scheme for access control purposes reverses the priority usually given to partition-B data packets over that of partition-C.