Traffic Analysis and Video Quality Evaluation of Multiple Description Coded Video Services for Fourth Generation Wireless IP Networks

For the performance evaluation of future wireless communication systems, such as the fourth generation wireless networks, traffic traces of realistic services are needed. Multiple description coding (MDC) is gaining a lot of interest lately and is a viable solution to provide robust video services over single or multi hop wireless networks and MDC introduces more flexibility for network coding. Furthermore it has the capability to support heterogeneous terminals as they are accepted to be used in 4G wireless networks. By means of twelve well known video sequences, in different video formats, we generate the frame size traces and evaluate the multiple description coding characteristics. In addition to that we highlight the expected overhead due to the underlying RTP/UDP/IP protocol suite. As an objective quality measurement at the application layer, we investigate the video quality in dependency of lost and error–prone descriptors. This allows researcher to convert the network losses of their network models directly into video quality values. This step makes the work unique as single layer coded video streams would always need further postprocessing to retrieve the video quality.