Prioritized packet fragmentation for H.264 video

We introduce a cross-layer priority-aware packet fragmentation scheme to enhance the quality of H.264 compressed bitstreams over bit-rate limited error-prone links in packet networks. The H.264 slices are prioritized in the encoder based on their cumulative mean square error (CMSE) contribution towards the received video quality. Specifically we derive the optimal fragment size for each priority level which achieves the maximum expected weighted goodput at different encoded video bit rates and slice sizes. The packet fragmentation scheme uses slice discard in the buffer. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme provides considerably improved video quality.