Investigation of scalable video delivery using H.264 SVC on an LTE network

The combination of increased data rates in 4G cellular networks (such as LTE Advanced), dedicated multicast/broadcast services (e-MBMS) and the emergence of scalable video coding standards (H.264 SVC) allow mobile operators to offer multimedia-based services with a high quality of experience to end users. H.264 SVC offers three dimensions of scalability v.i.z. Quality (SNR), Temporal and Spatial. In this paper we investigate the use of Scalable Video Coding (SVC) for video delivery over an LTE network. In particular, we carried on a two step performance evaluation: first, we perform a static analysis on how different types of scalability influences the video quality, then, we analyze through simulations how the transmission over a wireless means further affects the quality. In our analysis, we adopted a wide range of metrics: 2 full reference metrics, namely PSNR and SSIM, along with 2 no reference metrics, MSU Blocking and Blurring. Our results show that no-reference evaluation metrics could be employed alongside a frame-drop metric in the place of full reference metrics. Moreover, we show that the video scalability alone is not sufficient to avoid a degradation of quality, in some cases in the order of seconds, when caused by packet loss.