Packet-level transmission distortion analysis for video streaming over mesh networks

In video transmission over wired or wireless mesh networks, video packets could be lost due to transmission errors, network congestion or delay bound violation. The compressed video data is highly sensitive to packet loss, and the packet loss will cause decoding failure and more importantly, the error propagation would significantly degrade the reconstructed video quality. In this paper, we extend our previous research and propose a simple yet accurate and robust model to estimate the transmission distortion of each Macro Block (MB) and packet. We then use this transmission distortion estimation results for packet scheduling in video streaming over mesh networks. Extensive simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed model under different experiment settings. More importantly, the estimated transmission distortion, which reveals the unequal importance of each MB and packet, enables important applications in content-aware resource allocation and performance optimization in video communication.