A Study of MPEG Video Transmission in Lossy Wireless Networks

In multimedia communications, different characteristics of wireless channel error models lead to different effects on the delivered video quality level. In this paper, we analyze the effects of wireless channel errors on the quality of MPEG video stream. First, we use an analytical model to derive an application-level evaluation metric, the Decodable Frame Rate (Q). This is more sufficient for the end users to evaluate the video quality than other network-level metrics, such as packet delay, loss rate, or delay jitter. Next, we introduce two kinds of wireless error models, the random uniform error model and the Gilbert-Elliot (GE) error model, which are widely used in the lossy wireless networks. The obtained results indicated two facts: firstly, the frame decodable rate of the theoretical analysis and simulation are extremely close; secondly, the analytical model provides the boundary condition of the video quality transmitted in a wireless link.