Intelligent and Selective Video Frames Discarding Policies for Improving Video Quality over Wired/Wireless Networks

Although IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN (WLAN) is of a great interest nowadays, it lacks the efficient capability of supporting real-time streaming which is due to mainly the contention nature of wireless media. In this paper, we extend our earlier work concerning improving video traffic over wireless networks through effectively studying the dependencies between video frames and their implications on the overall network performance. In other words, we propose very efficient and novel algorithms that aim to minimize the cost of possible losses by intelligently and selectively discard frames based on their contribution to picture quality, namely, partial and intelligent-partial frame discarding policies considering the dependencies between video frames. The performance metrics that are employed to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms include the rate of non-decodable frames and peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR). Our results are promising and show significant improvements in the perceived video quality over what is relevant in the current literature.