QoS-based active dropping mechanism for NGN video streaming optimization

摘要

Video streaming over mobile wireless networks is getting popular in recent years. High video quality relies on large bandwidth provisioning, however, it decreases the number of supported users in wireless networks. Thus, effective bandwidth utilization becomes a crucial issue in wireless network as the bandwidth resource in wireless environment is precious and limited. The NGN quality of service mechanisms should be designed to reduce the impact of traffic burstiness on buffer management. For this reason, we propose an active dropping mechanism to deal with the effective bandwidth utilization in this paper. We use scalable video coding extension of H.264/AVC standard to provide different video quality for users of different levels. In the proposed dropping mechanism, when the network loading exceeds the threshold, the dropping mechanism starts to drop data of the enhancement layers for users of low service level. The dropping probability alters according to the change in network loading. With the dropping mechanism, the base station increases the system capability and users are able to obtain better service quality when the system is under heavy loading. We also design several methods to adjust the threshold value dynamically. By using the proposed mechanism, better quality can be provided when the network is in congestion.