Analysis of packet header effects in rate allocation for packet video

The packet header is often ignored in the bit allocation problem of forward error correction (FEC) based packet video transmission schemes. In this paper, we show that the packet header has significant influence on the system performance. We balance the effect of the packet header and the efficiency of FEC codes via a probabilistic formulation. Optimal bit allocation is achieved in both nonscalable video and scalable video. Experiments show that the reconstructed video quality is improved significantly by our algorithm. Finally, we also study the effect of parameter mismatch on the performance of our algorithm.