Analysis of H.264 Bitstream Prioritization for Dual TCP/UDP Streaming of HD video over WLANs

Flexible Dual-TCP/UDP Streaming Protocol (FDSP) is a new method for streaming H.264-encoded HD video over wireless networks. The method takes advantage of the hierarchical structure of H.264/AVC syntax and uses TCP to transmit important syntax elements of H.264/AVC video and UDP to transmit less important elements. FDSP was shown to outperform pure-UDP streaming in visual quality and pure-TCP streaming in delay. In this work, FDSP is expanded to include a new parameter called Bitstream Prioritization (BP). The newly modified algorithm, FDSP-BP, is analyzed to measure the impact of BP on the quality of streaming for partially and fully congested networks. Our analysis shows that FDSP-BP is superior to pure-TCP streaming methods with respect to rebuffering instances, while still maintaining high visual quality.