Adaptive per-GOP Bandwidth allocation for H.264 Video Transmission over Differentiated Services Networks

While transmitting over differentiated services networks, in case of severe congestion also the most privileged classes may experience losses. In those cases, and especially in case of video transmission, protecting a higher fraction of traffic can have the effect of decreasing the quality, due to the overload of high-priority classes. We propose a method to compute, at source side, the allocation of video traffic over the available classes to ensure the lowest decoder-side distortion and provide traffic friendliness. To show this algorithm performance, the simple case of Poisson traffic with a bottleneck shared-buffer router is shown. The same approach can be extended to other traffic characteristics and router architectures.