DiffServ-Aware Streaming of H.264 Video

In this paper we present a method for streaming video generated by the state-of-the-art H.264 codec over IP networks supporting the Differentiated Services (DiffServ) architecture, in particular the Assured Forwarding (AF) per-hop behavior. The scheme takes advantage of both AF’s packet drop priorities and some novel features of the H.264 codec, so as to protect the most important information in terms of visual quality and reduce distorsion under network congestion. The proposed method is evaluated by means of the H.264 reference software codec, network simulation and objective video quality measurements. Our results show that the proposed method allows to achieve a higher quality than traditional best-effort streaming. Key-words: IP networks, DiffServ, Assured Forwarding, video streaming, H.264.