Performance evaluation of H.264/SVC video streaming over mobile WiMAX

Mobile broadband wireless networks, such as mobile WiMAX, have been designed to support several features like, e.g., Quality of Service (QoS) or enhanced data protection mechanisms, in order to provide true access to real-time multimedia applications like Voice over IP or Video on Demand. On the other hand, recently defined video coding schemes, like H.264 scalable video coding (H.264/SVC), are evolving in order to better adapt to such mobile environments with heterogeneous clients and time-varying available capacity. In this work we assess the performance of H.264/SVC video streaming over mobile WiMAX under realistic network conditions. To this aim, we make use of specific metrics, like PSNR (Peak Signal to Noise Ratio) or MOS (Mean Opinion Score), which are related to the quality of experience as perceived by the end user. Simulation results show that the performance is sensitive to the different available H.264/SVC encoding options, which respond differently to the loss of data in the network. On the other hand, if aggressive error recovery based on WiMAX data protection mechanisms is used, this might lead to unacceptable latencies in the video play out, especially for those mobiles with poor wireless channel characteristics.