Effect of packet loss in video quality of experience

Abstract

Today, packet video solutions are found everywhere, mainly due to the many advantages that they offer. Nevertheless, packet losses due to network issues like errors or jitter, affect decoder performance, thus generating video artifacts. The user's quality of experience decreases, depending among other factors, on the information carried by the lost packets. In this work we analyze the effect of packet loss in decoded video as a function of the part of the frame affected by the error and how the error is propagated because of temporal prediction. Then, we create a model which makes use of all the information available at the network level in a typical commercial multimedia deployment (such as Internet Protocol television [IPTV]). Finally, we apply that model to the overall design of content-aware network applications governing quality of service measures, video scrambling strategies, and smart retransmission algorithms.