Video Capacity of WLANs With a Multiuser Perceptual Quality Constraint

• Published in: IEEE transactions on multimedia Vol. 10; no. 8; pp. 1465 - 1478
• Main Authors: Jing Hu, Choudhury, S., Gibson, J.D.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY IEEE 01.12.2008; Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Applied sciences; Computer science; control theory; systems; Computer systems and distributed systems. User interface; Cross layer design; Distortion measurement; Exact sciences and technology; Language processing and microprogramming; Local area networks; Multiple users; Open systems; perceptuial video quality; PSNR; Rate-distortion; Software; Telecommunication traffic; video capacity; Video codecs; Video compression; Wireless LAN; Wireless networks; WLAN; Streaming; Video coding; Multiple access; Wireless LAN; Critical system; Transmission protocol; Interconnected power system; Video signal; Transmission channel; Teletraffic; Multiple users; WLAN; Distributed system; video capacity; Image quality; Codec; Quality control; Wireless network; Voice; perceptuial video quality
• ISSN: 1520-9210; 1941-0077
• DOI: 10.1109/TMM.2008.2007329

As wireless local area networks (WLANs) become a part of our network infrastructure, it is critical that we understand both the performance provided to the end users and the capacity of these WLANs in terms of the number of supported flows (calls). Since it is clear that video traffic, as well as voice and data, will be carried by these networks, it is particularly important that we investigate these issues for packetized video. In this paper, we investigate the video user capacity of wireless networks subject to a multiuser perceptual quality constraint. As a particular example, we study the transmission of AVC/H.264 coded video streams over an IEEE 802.11a WLAN subject to a constraint on the quality of the delivered video experienced by r% (75%, for example) of the users of the WLAN. This work appears to be the first such effort to address this difficult but important problem. Furthermore, the methodology employed is perfectly general and can be used for different networks, video codecs, transmission channels, protocols, and perceptual quality measures.