Video quality assessment based on data hiding for IEEE 802.11 wireless networks

This paper investigates the quality evaluation of H.264-encoded digital videos when transmitted over IEEE 802.11 wireless networks. To accomplish this task, we use a no-reference video quality metric based on a data hiding technique. The impact of IEEE 802.11 DCF parameters on the quality of H.264-encoded videos is studied through a detailed analytical model for saturated single-hop networks under perfect channel conditions. The numerical results obtained indicate that, in spite of the fact that the minimum contention window size has a significant impact on other network performance metrics (e.g., throughput, delay, and jitter), it is not as relevant as the retransmission limit parameter as far as perceptual video quality is concerned. Such observation leads to the fact that, depending on the number of nodes in the network, one must trade faster video streaming for buffering space by using the retransmission limit parameter as a key parameter control in the design of adaptive multimedia-oriented IEEE 802.11 wireless networks.