Reliable Video Multicasting over WLANs

Abstract

As is known reliable multicast transmission is not addressed in WLANs. Multicast packets are sent over wireless channels without using medium access control (MAC) layer automatic repeat request (ARQ) mechanism. Therefore, packet error rates will be very high. This paper investigates reliable video multicasting, which became a very popular application, over WLANs. To this end, application layer forward error correction (AL-FEC) codes based on Raptor Q can be used as a means to provide reliable delivery of the multicast video encoded with the H.264/Advanced video coding (AVC) codec. Since video streaming applications have very stringent Quality of Service requirements (low delay and error free transmission of packets), the Raptor Q and the H.264/AVC parameters have to be determined depending on the QoS of the video. Therefore, in this work an advanced cross-layer simulator was developed to analyse the performance of the end-to-end system. Simulation results show that using AL-FEC significantly improve the received video quality, i.e., the mean peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) is improved over 34 dB. Further that it is shown that frequently inserting intra-frame results in poor video quality. Therefore, it is suggested to send intra frame at longer intervals.

Keywords

• AL-FEC,Multicast,Video streaming,H.264/AVC

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