A Prioritized Multi-queue Method for H.264/AVC Live Streaming in Wireless Networks

Due to the flaws in wireless networks such as instable transmission and bandwidth fluctuation, the TCP conducts live streaming better than the UDP in a wireless network. In the TCP streaming, a sender has to select which data is to be aborted or which one to be passed, when a given bandwidth is not enough to process the entire stream. Faced with the difficulty, the data marginal to video quality should be stepped aside to secure the quality of the transferred video data. Herein, we propose a novel method for prioritizing the H.264/AVC network abstraction layer (NAL) units via nal_ref_idc (NRI) field of an NAL unit header. Thereby, the proposed method is designed to help sort out unimportant NAL units. In addition, we designed a sending method based on the prioritized multi-queue. Finally, with the simulation results, we proved that the proposed method guarantees video streaming of high quality (high PSNR) in wireless networks.