A low-complexity packet classification algorithm for multiple description video streaming over IEEE802.11E networks

The robust transmission of video sequences over wireless LANs presents several challenging problems concerning the presence of packet losses, delays, and bandwidth limitations. Their effect on the visual quality of the sequence reconstructed by the end user can be mitigated by adopting a wireless architecture that is able to support different levels of quality-of-service (QoS), like the IEEE 802.11e standard, and by compressing the video sequence to be transmitted using a robust source coder, like a multiple description coding (MDC) scheme. This paper presents a MDC-based video streaming architecture that tries to adaptively optimize the performance of both solutions by assigning the RTP video packets produced by the MDC encoder to the different QoS classes of IEEE 802.11e. Simulation results show that the performance is significantly improved with respect to a non-adaptive solution.