Packet importance based scheduling strategy for H.264 video transmission in wireless networks

This paper investigates the problem of H.264 video transmission in wireless networks. We propose a packet scheduling algorithm based on the packet quality contribution index (PQCI) of H.264 video packet. The PQCI is estimated not only by the quality distortion made for the current frame, but also by that made for the frames which are directly or indirectly related with current frame. A dual-decoder-model (DDM) algorithm is proposed for the PQCI estimation. In DDM algorithm, we develop a novel architecture with two simulated decoders in the sender. To reduce the computational complexity, an estimated-model (EM) algorithm is also proposed. In EM algorithm, the coding characters of video that are pre-coded are extracted for the PQCI estimation. The results demonstrate that our schemes can bring a significant gain to the end-to-end video quality with respect to traditional methods.