Improving H.264 video transmission in 802.11e EDCA

Multimedia streaming over wired network, such as the Internet, has been popular now for quite some time. Further, as the bandwidth of wireless technologies have increased, consideration has only recently turned to delivering video over wireless networks. Meanwhile, an emerging new video compression standard namely H.264 is widely accepted. The H.264 standard outperforms all previous video compression, and can deliver high video quality at low rate. However, due to wireless channel characteristics, it is insufficient to merely deliver video data; instead delivery must consider also an adaptation of the video data to the networks specific and particularly network friendliness. In this paper, we address H.264 wireless video transmission over IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN by proposing a robust cross layer architecture which exploits: (i) the new standard IEEE 802.11e MAC protocol; (ii) the H.264 error resilience tools, namely data partitioning. The performances of the proposed architecture are extensively investigated by simulations. Results obtained indicate that our architecture can reliably transport the H.264 video stream, while the actual IEEE 802.11 standard in the same conditions, degrades considerably the transmitted video.