Efficiency of PET and MPEG Encoding for Video Streams: Analytical QoS Evaluations

A promising solution in the transmission of video streams via communication networks is to use forward error control in order to mask some of the transmission errors and data losses at the receiving side. The redundancy required, however, to achieve error correction without retransmissions will consume some transmission capacity of a network, therefore possibly enforcing stronger compression of the video stream to be transmitted. In this paper we introduce analytical models which allow us to determine the expected frame loss probability of MPEG encoded video streams assuming communication via constant bit rate (CBR) virtual circuits with data losses and/or unrecoverable transmission errors. The models can be used to compare the quality-of-service (QoS) as observed on Application Layer for encoding schemes without and with forward error control, possibly making use of different prioritization of transmitted data units (in particular applying PET encoding algorithm as designed at ICSI). The models are applied in various case studies to compare the efficiency of the error control schemes covered.

ICSI Technical Report TR-97-015

Technical Report