On Improving the QoS of Video Applications with H.264 over WPANs

Abstract

WPANs are gaining in popularity as cheap, easy to deploy networks to collect real-time contextual information. Research in the area of WPANs has been focused mostly on energy efficiency with only a few papers on supporting video applications on these networks. In this work we will present a new method to improve the quality of video applications over WPANs. The proposed solution is based on a cross-layer architecture to collect information on the state of the network, and to dynamically modify the parameters of the H.264 coder at the source accordingly. We prove through extensive simulations on ns-2 that this adaptive implementation of the H.264 video coder improves the quality of the video at the receiver as compared to the regular static implementation.