A Novel Marker System for Real-Time H.264 Video Delivery Over Diffserv Networks

Packet marking plays a key role in video transmission over DiffServ Networks. Legacy marker systems mark video packets mainly based on the coding types of corresponding frames in order to achieve priority transmission. In this paper, we propose a novel packet marker system for realtime H.264 video delivery. Our system marks packets depending on the corresponding frames´ contribution to the video quality. The frame relative importance index (FRII) is defined to estimate each frame´s contribution, using the degradation of video quality caused by the loss of information in that frame. Consequently, packets of each frame are differently protected according to the FRII in delivery and the video perceptual quality is improved. Simulation results show that our system outperforms the legacy marker systems in terms of the quality of the delivered H.264 video streams.