Performance Evaluation of MPEG-4 Video Transmission over IP-Networks: Best-Effort and Quality-of-Service

Abstract

The demand for video communication over internet has been growing rapidly in recent years and the quality of video has become a challenging issue for video transmission. Different types of video coding standards like MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 have been developed to support application like video transmission. MPEG-2 which requires high bit rate transmission has been successful video standard for DVD and satellite digital broadcasting. On the other hand, MPEG-4 supports low bit rate and is suitable for transmitting video over IP networks. In this paper, MPEG-4 Video standard has been used for evaluating the performance of video transmission over two IP networks:- Best-effort and Quality of Service (QoS). For both of the best-effort and QoS IP networks, peak signal noise ratio (PSNR), throughput, frame and packet statistics have been considered as performance metrics. The calculated values of these performance metrics reflect that video transmission over QoS IP network is better than that of the best-effort network.

Keywords: video transmission, mpeg, ip networks, best-effort, quality of service, ns-2