Queue Control Strategies for Multimedia Networking

We report here on our research on queue control strategies for multimedia networking and the effects of multi-path routing on MPEG video quality. MPEG video is encoded into an ns-2 compatible trace file format, and transmitted via the simulator. The subjective and objective performance metrics of the received transmitted video trace are analyzed. This network simulation framework then implements different queue control strategies to prioritize and transmit different MPEG frames through different routes, in order to maximize the network bandwidth utilization and to optimize the received video quality. These queue control strategies are augmented with selective packet dropping approaches and their effect on the received video quality is discussed in detail.