Scalable Video Coding of H.264/AVC Video Streaming with QoS-Based Active Dropping in 802.16e Networks

Abstract

Multimedia applications over mobile wireless network are becoming popular in recent years. High video quality depends on the wide bandwidth but the wide bandwidth restricts the number of users in the network system. Effective bandwidth utilization is the major problem in wireless network because the bandwidth resource in wireless environment is limited and precious. For this reason, we propose an active dropping mechanism to deal with the effective bandwidth utilization problem. In the proposed mechanism, if the network loading exceeds the threshold, the dropping mechanism starts to drop the enhancement layer data for low level user and the dropping probability is varying with the different network loading. For the multimedia application, we use the characteristic of the scalable video coding (SVC) extension of H.264/AVC standard to provide different video quality for different level user. By the dropping mechanism, base station increases the system capability and users can obtain better quality of service when the system is under heavy loading. In this paper, we study the network platform of the 802.16e standard and add the QoS-based active dropping mechanism to the MAC layer. In the simulation results, the system capability that releases bandwidth by dropping mechanism and service quality of users are observed.