Statistical analysis of H.264 video frame size distribution

H.264 video traffic is expected to account for the majority of multimedia traffic to be carried in future heterogeneous networks. Modelling video frame sizes is highly useful in simulation studies, mathematical analysis and generating synthetic video traces for the purpose of testing and compliance. In this study, a statistical analysis is performed to determine an appropriate distribution of video frame sizes generated by the popular H.264 video codec. The study makes use of a number of real video traces with the goal of evaluating and fitting their frame sizes with well-known distributions. In the literature, it is reported that the Gamma and Weibull distributions give the best fit for frame sizes in the most popular video codecs including H.264. Our statistical analysis shows that both Gamma and Weibull distributions are very close to each other in terms of goodness-of-fit results and they give the best fit. The authors also show that the Inverse Gaussian distribution is ranked second after Gamma and Weibull distributions. Finally, they show that the distributions of Pearson Type V and Lognormal are ranked third and fourth in terms of goodness-of-fit.