Performance analysis of H.264/AVC, H.264/SVC, and VP8 over IEEE 802.11 wireless networks

Although the latest video codecs such as H.264/AVC, H.264/SVC, and VP8 were developed with network-friendly features, provisioning the quality of video delivery over IEEE 802.11 wireless networks is still challenging because of error-prone medium and random access. This paper evaluates the quality of video delivery using those latest video codecs over IEEE 802.11. Our results show that reduction of coded video data, consideration of the queue size of each Access Category, and the mandatory implementation of error recovery features in H.264/SVC can help provide robust multimedia transmission over IEEE 802.11. In addition, the performance of the latest video codecs is compared via extensive simulation scenarios. Our comparison shows that VP8 achieves good video quality with the basic medium access control techniques of IEEE 802.11, whereas H.264/AVC and H.264/SVC benefit significantly from appropriate mapping schemes between encoded video fragments and IEEE 802.11e Access Categories.