Video packet loss rate prediction over delay-prone packet-based networks

Abstract

The continuous advancement in communication technology has introduced many video communication applications. The rise in demand for these applications has brought about an increase in bandwidth consumption. Despite the ability of the new generation of technology to render this need, challenges on transmitting a video with good quality over networks still exists. One of these is the variation in delay caused by congestion in the links of the network. In real-time transmission, this delay can cause a packet to be dropped, leading to an error in the video stream. This error can propagate to the subsequent frames, further degrading the quality of video at the receiver end. One major cause of error propagation is the loss of packets due to an extensive delay. In this paper, a multi-hop wired network was simulated to demonstrate packet loss due to packet drop caused by queuing on the hops; and the effects of packet drop in video transmission on the quality of video were observed. A maximum threshold end-to-end delay had been observed wherein the packet is dropped when this value of delay is exceeded. The dropped packet had been correlated to the number of queued packets on the link where it was dropped. With the simulated packet loss pattern used on video transmission, the quality of video between lossless video transmission and that with packet loss and the effects of packet loss between different bit rate and motion complexity had been observed and differentiated.