Enhanced prioritization for video streaming over wireless home networks with IEEE 802.11e

Cyclic intra refresh is able to mitigate temporal error propagation. This paper exploits the unequal error sensitivity introduced within individual video frames when using a cyclic intra refresh line of macroblocks. Slice-level priority is proposed based on the relative position of a slice with respect to the intra refresh line. Two in-frame prioritization schemes are investigated: a region-based priority assignment and a packet-based priority assignment. The region-based scheme assigns packet priorities in the order of bitstream arrival to the packetizer, whereas the packet-based scheme assigns priorities within regions and does not follow bitstream arrival order to the packetizer. The proposed schemes do not add any bitrate or computational overheads and no decoder modification is required. Simulation results for streaming high-definition video over a quality-of-service enabled home wireless network show that the packet-based scheme can achieve quality gains up to 3 dB over sending video without applying priorities.