Comparison of the Behavior of Video Codecs in Wi-Fi IEEE 802.11ac Environment

A major challenge for digital video storage or traffic was that the original or uncompressed video required a lot of digital information. Therefore, it was necessary to carry out some compression process to transmit or store digitized video with the least amount of bits possible. The word compression, as a synonym for coding, refers to the device called codec (coder-decoder), which is commonly used in multimedia environments. Since the 1990s, approximately every nine years, the development of a new standard is concluded, and each new codec is almost twice as efficient as the previous one. The newer compression methods are much more complex and more sophisticated than the previous ones, but they demand much more computational power. This paper presents a comparative study of codec behavior by experimentation. A balanced combination of established standards and some newer ones for contrast were selected. It used a trailer of the movie Star Trek, and a video of an Adobe Connect videoconference, of the same duration. The videos were encoded in H.264, H.265, VP8 and Theora. It proposes an experiment in a real laboratory, with wireless clients working in the IEEE 802.11ac standard and IPv6. The conclusions of the work will help to determine the adequate management of similar real or simulated networks.