Congestion Resiliency of Data Partitioned H.264/AVC Video over Wireless Networks

Data partitioning is an error resiliency technique that provides unequal error protection for transmission over lossy channels. Including a per-picture, cyclic intra-refresh macroblock (MB) line guards against temporal error propagation. This paper considers the impact of this form of error resilience on access control and proposes a selective dropping scheme based on dropping the partition bearing intra-coded MBs. The paper shows that by this scheme, when congestion occurs, it is possible to gain up to 3dB in video quality prior to transmission over assigning a stream to a single IEEE 802.11e access category. The scheme is shown to be consistently advantageous over other ways of assigning the partitioned data packets to different access categories. This counterintuitive scheme for access control purposes reverses the priority usually given to partition B data packets over partition C data packets.