Evaluation of Streaming MPEG Video Over Wireless Channels

We propose an analytical model to derive from the packet loss rate an objective application-level metric, the decodable frame rate (Q), thus allowing the evaluation of the packet loss effect on the streaming MPEG video quality over wireless channels, as perceived by end users. We analyze the effects on video quality using a random uniform error model and the Gilbert-Elliot (GE) error model (for burst errors modeling) to represent wireless lossy channels. Results obtained through extensive simulations indicate the effectiveness of our proposed model for both the random uniform and GE error models, provided that the packet error rate remains relatively low. Moreover, owing to the well-acceptance of PSNR as an objective performance metric that takes into account the video content to assess the video quality, we also investigate the relationship between PSNR and Q as well as their comparative performances as metrics for video quality assessment. Results show that the Q metric reflects well the behavior of the PSNR metric, whereas being much less time-consuming.