An Analysis of Constant Bitrate and Constant PSNR Video Encoding for Wireless Networks

In wireless networks, transmission of constant-quality, high bitrate video is a challenging task due to channel capacity and buffer limitations. Content adaptive rate control, is used as a solution to this problem. Instead of transmitting all of the video content at low quality, the most important content can be transmitted at high quality while still preserving an acceptable quality for the remaining segments. Furthermore, the rate control strategy inside the individual temporal segments plays a key role for the network performance and viewing quality. Although constant quality video encoding inside the temporal segments is preferable for the best viewing experience, it causes more network packet losses due to adverse bitrate fluctuations in the video stream. In cases when the network is too much loaded, it may be better to employ constant bitrate encoding for network friendliness. In this paper, a performance analysis of constant bitrate and constant peak signal-to-noise ratio encoding for content adaptive rate controlled video streaming over wireless networks is presented. Experimental results obtained using AVC/H.264 encoding in a CDMA/HDR multi-user environment with cross-layer optimized scheduling show performance comparisons of CBR and CPSNR encoding.