Content-Based Packet Video Forwarding Mechanism in Differentiated Service Networks

To overcome the inherent limitation of the best-effort Internet, differentiated services (DiffServ) for different applications are being embodied by the IETF DiffServ workgroup. The imminent deployment of DiffServ networks will benefit a lot if continuous media applications at the end-systems are aware of their service model. In this paper, we propose a content-based packet video forwarding mechanism where the QoS interaction between video applications and DiffServ network is taken into account. The interaction is performed through a dynamic mapping between the relative priority score (RPS) of each video packet and the differentiated forwarding mechanism. The relative priority is designed to reflect its loss propagation effect for each packet and calculated by merging the relative importance of its component media. Then, the forwarding mechanism provides service differentiation based on the relative QoS requirement of each packet. To verify the efficiency of the proposed strategy, the end-to-end performance is evaluated through packet video transmission over a simulated DiffServ network. The results show that the proposed interaction framework can explore the DiffServ gain efficiently, resulting in enhanced end-to-end video quality.