Performance evaluation of HEVC over delay-prone wired networks

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is the latest compression standard designed at improving the efficiency of all video streams. Most research on the subject of HEVC focuses on the improvements of video compression efficiency. In this paper, work is conducted into streaming of HEVC over delay-prone wired networks. The transmission of data over delay-prone networks will affect the quality of the data being transmitted. It is quite often that network delays and packet loss happen because of the congestion caused by the limited capacity of the network. Different error patterns were generated from the simulated wired networks using Network Simulator 2 (NS2). To implement the packet loss generated, the packetization format for HEVC Network Abstraction Layer (NAL) units was utilized. A basic error concealment method was used from the modified HEVC decoder to recuperate from the loss generated from the simulated network. The results based on the quality of the decoded video were measured by the peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR). The effects of varying the maximum Coding Tree Unit (CTU) size from 16x16 to 32x32 to 64x64 and the various Quantization Parameter (QP) values given a set of test video sequences with different bitrates was also covered on the evaluation of the performance of HEVC. In a delay-prone network, when the motion of the video increases, the greater the decrease will be in terms of PSNR. Improving the quality of HEVC decoded video streams require further implementations with error resiliency techniques and as such, the work of the group will be used as a point of reference for future research.