A Bandwidth-Efficient Application Level Framing Protocol for H.264 Video Multicast over Wireless LANs

Optimizing wireless bandwidth utilization is one of the numerous challenges in wireless IP multimedia systems design. This paper describes and evaluates the performance of a novel Application Level Framing protocol for efficient transmission of H.264 video over error-prone wireless IP links. The proposed ALF protocol introduces an innovative loss spreading scheme for video streaming services which is based on (i) a bandwidth-efficient adaptive H.264 video fragmentation and (ii) an unequal-interleaved protection for improving FEC efficiency. Both video fragmentation and interleaving are coordinated in a frame-based granularity providing bounded end-to-end delays. Performance evaluation results show that the proposed protocol allows graceful video quality degradation over error-prone wireless links while minimizing the overall bandwidth consumption and the end-to-end latency.