On the performance of H.264/MVC over lossy IP-based networks

This paper studies the performance of different packetization schemes (single NAL Unit, aggregation packet and Fragmentation Unit) for the emerging H.264/MVC standard, in terms of overhead, number of decoded frames, error propagation and PSNR using different network conditions (MTU size, packet loss). The experimentation test-bed platform, utilizes the Multi Session Transmission approach for various video packetization options in terms of the number of NAL Units per frame. Extensive test-bed experiments indicate that the fragmentation of frames in more than one NAL Units results in significantly higher perceived video quality, in terms of PSNR, for both base and non-base view, than the fragmentation of the NAL Unit at the RTP layer.