Technique to Improve MPEG-4 Traffic Schedulers in IEEE 802.15.3 WPANs

Video traffic, especially MPEG-4 streams, is envisioned to be a dominant traffic type in the IEEE 802.15.3 high-rate wireless personal area networks (WPANs). The unique hierarchical structure of MPEG-4 streams calls for special measures at the MAC layer, in order to improve the quality of service (QoS). In this paper, we propose a frame-decodability aware (FDA) technique to make the scheduling algorithms aware of the hierarchical structure and decoding dependencies in MPEG-4 streams. Simulation results show that the FDA technique can significantly reduce the decoding failure rate of various scheduling algorithms, under MPEG-4 traffic.