(IJCNS) International Journal of Computer and Network Security, 11

Vol. 2, No. 5, May 2010

Performance Evaluation of MPEG-4 Video

Transmission over IEEE802.11e
Abdirisaq Mohammed Jama1, Sinzobakwira Issa2 and Othman O. Khalifa3
1
International Islamic University Malaysia,
Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering,
P.O.Box 10, 50728, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
wacays91@hotmail.com
2
International Islamic University Malaysia,
Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering,
P.O.Box 10, 50728, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
issa10issa@gmail.com
3
International Islamic University Malaysia,
Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering,
P.O.Box 10, 50728, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
khalifa@iiu.edu.my

channel. In the following section 2, we briefly preview the

Abstract: Transmitting MPEG-4 video over Wireless Local
Area Networks is expected to be an important component of
many emerging multimedia applications. One of the critical
issues for multimedia applications is to ensure that the Quality
of Service (QoS) requirement to be maintained at an acceptable
level. The IEEE802.11 working group developed a standard
called IEEE802.11e to support Quality of Service (QoS) in
WLANs. This standard aims to support QoS by providing
differentiated classes of service at the Medium Access Control
(MAC) layer to enhance the ability of physical layers to deliver
time-critical traffic in the presence of traditional data packets.
In this Paper, Network Simulator 2 (NS-2) & Evalvid are used
as simulation tool to evaluate the Performance of MPEG-4
Video Transmissions over IEEE802.11e. A modification of the
parameters of NS-2 and Evalvid were done to present the
evaluated method. This has allowed us to control the different
design metrics values such as Frame/Packet loss, PSNR &
Decodable Frame Rate (Q). In this paper, we evaluate a
framework which consists of a MAC-centric cross-layer
architecture to allow MAC layer to retrieve video streaming
packet information, and a single-video multi-level queue to
prioritize I/P/B slice (packet) delivery, the evaluated systematic
scheme shows better results for lower packet loss, higher PSNR
& Decodable Frame Rate (Q) for MPEG-4 video transmission
over IEEE 802.11e..
Keywords: IEEE802.11e, MPEG-4, NS-2, Evalvid.
1. Introduction
Efficient video transmission over wireless remains one of
the challenging goals for multimedia communications
because of the scarce wireless resources, high bandwidth
and quality of service (QoS) requirement for video
transmission. However, studies on the MPEG-4 video
transmission in the wireless networks are not well explored.
This paper proposes a study of the transfer of video
sequences coded in MPEG-4 over wireless networks using
the IEEE802.11e technology. Quantifying the effects of
these simulations will help us in the design of a scheme for
the adaptation of MPEG-4 Video transmission over wireless
related work involved in the transmission of MPEG-4 video
packets over IEEE802.11e.
Section 3 presents the simulation set-up, & Network
topology of our simulation study. In section 4, simulation
results are presented and discussed. The conclusion is given
in Section 5 followed by the References.
2. Related Work
IEEE802.11 is one of most popular medium access control
protocols in the world. However, with IEEE802.11 it is
difficult to guarantee QoS because all stations use the equal
access method and network parameters.
With the development of services such as multimedia
streaming, the demands for QoS guarantees are increasing.
The IEEE standard [13] proposed IEEE802.11e medium
access control protocol for QoS guarantee extends the
existent and enhancements of IEEE802.11 Medium Access
Control protocols and newly defines the HCF (Hybrid
Coordination Function). HCF proposed two methods: EDCA
(Enhanced Distributed Channel Access) and HCCA (HCF
Controlled Channel Access).
The EDCA model is the competition base medium access
method and the HCCA model is a polling base medium
access method to act under the control of the HC (Hybrid
Coordinator). The EDCA model is designed to provide a
differentiation service based on priority, and is similar with
the DCF (Distributed Coordination Function) model of
existing 802.11 MAC. The EDCA model is the defining
concept of AC (Access Category) for QoS support. Each AC
has competition parameters, AIFS [AC] (Arbitration Inter-
frame Space) that alternate DIFS (Distributed Inter-frame
Space), CWmin [AC] and CWmax [AC] [1], [2].
Fig. 1 shows the structure of IEEE802.11e EDCA model,
Wireless Station (WSTA) that have QoS parameters to
12 (IJCNS) International Journal of Computer and Network Security,
Vol. 2, No. 5, May 2010

decide priority and four transmission queues that are bandwidth of networks because it does not have an adaptive
recognized by the virtual station. If more than two values of transmission rate adjustments scheme. As a result,
the back-off counter in a station reach to 0 at the same time, transmission queue overflow or loss of data causes
the scheduler of WSTA prevents a virtual collision. degradation in the quality of the video streaming service.

In [7] the authors classify cross-layer architectures for video

Figure 1. Structure of IEEE802.11e model
Fig. 2 shows the medium access method of the EDCA
model. Each frame has an AIFS [AC] of different size
according to the priority. Frames of highest priority have
IFS (Inter-frame Space) such as DIFS, and low priority
frames have longer IFS than others. As a result, the
probability of access to the medium of frame and the priority
of frame are in proportion. The sizes of the competition
windows are different CWmin [AC] and CWmax [AC]
according to each AC.
transport over wireless networks into five categories:-
1. Top-down approach: the higher-layer protocols optimize
their parameters and the strategies at the next lower layer.
2. Bottom-up approach: the lower layers try to insulate the
higher layers from losses and bandwidth variations.
3. Application-centric approach: the APP layer optimizes
the lower layer parameters one at a time in a bottom-up
(starting from the PHY) or top-down manner, based on its
requirements.
4. MAC-centric approach: the APP layer passes its traffic
information and requirements to the MAC, which decides
which APP layer packets/flows should be transmitted and at
what QoS level.
5. Integrated approach: strategies are determined jointly by
all the open system interconnection (OSI) layers.

Figure 3. MAC Centric Cross-layer Architecture

Figure 2. Medium Access Control method of IEEE802.11e

EDCA
If the priority of the frame is high, it has a small CWmin
[AC] and CWmax [AC]. Therefore, the latency times to
medium access of the high priority frames can be reduced
even if a collision arises, and the data in transmission queue
can have a transmission opportunity easily.
As shown in Fig. 3, the MAC layer treats video streams
differently. Thus, the application layer passes its traffic
information (the priority of the streams) with their QoS
requirements to the MAC layer, which maps these partitions
to different traffic categories to improve the perceived video
quality.

There is much research taking place on transmitting

multimedia video efficiently using the medium access
control method of the IEEE802.11e EDCA model
[3],[4],[5]. Techniques, among the ones being researched to
improve quality of service, use the discriminating medium
access control method of IEEE802.11e EDCA model
according to the importance of the video data type [6].
However, these techniques can create attempts at Figure 4. Prioritized Packetization
unnecessary data transmission that exceed available
 (IJCNS) International Journal of Computer and Network Security, 13
Vol. 2, No. 5, May 2010

> AC_P > AV_B > AV_Non-video If most of the

Prioritized Packetization gives priority to each frame
according to the importance of the MPEG-4 video frames.
The frame degree of importance becomes different
according to the relativity of the frames and the compression
rate [8]. Fig. 4 shows the structure of the prioritized
packetization module that gives priority to each frame
according to the degree of importance of the frame; the
parser program reads each compressed video stream from
the video encoder output and generates a traffic trace file.
transmissions are MPEG-4 video packets of the same QoS
level then the advantage of priority multi-level queue will no
more exist. Hence we use a single-video multilevel queue by
creating four access categories, AC_0 (highest priority),
AC_1 (second priority), and AC_2 (third priority). I-slice,
P-slice and B-slice packets are assigned to AC_0, AC_1,
and AC_2, respectively, and the remaining AC is dedicated
to non-video traffic.

3. Simulation Set-up
To evaluate the performance of IEEE802.11e we have
conducted simulations using a widely adopted network
Simulator (NS-2) [9] integrated with EvalVid [10].
The original NS2 software supports the IEEE802.11e only,
and it was necessary to augment it with the new
IEEE802.11e. The EDCA setup is added using the TKN
implementation of IEEE802.11e [11]. All simulations were
done under Windows XP Service Pack 2 using Cygwin [11]
in order to run NS-2 under Windows Operating Systems.

3.1 Network Topology

We consider a wireless topology having an infrastructure
WLAN with a varying number of wireless stations, and one
access point (AP) as shown in Fig. 5.

Figure 6. Single Video multi-level Queue

As shown in Fig. 6 our proposed scheme is a single-video

multi-level queue to prioritize I/P/B slice (packet) delivery,
this IEEE802.11e priority multi-level queue is able to
enhance bandwidth utilization.

Figure 5. Simulation Network Topology

All stations communicate with each other through the AP.

All stations are located in the same domain with the AP.
There is no mobility in the system to avoid the wireless
problems such as the hidden node problem. All stations send
Figure 7. Foreman QCIF (176 x 144)
CBR (Constant Bit Rate) traffic at a fixed sending rate and
interval. UDP is implemented as the transport layer
protocol.
The video source can be either in the YUV QCIF (176 x
144) or in the YUV CIF (352 x 288) formats.
The video source used in the simulation is YUV QCIF (176
x 144), Foreman. Each video frame was fragmented into
4. Simulation Results packets before transmission, and the maximum transmission
IEEE802.11e EDCA has priority multi-level queue, AC packet size over the simulated network is 1000 bytes, Fig. 7
(Access Category). The priorities of the four ACs are AC_I shows the video used in our simulations.
14 (IJCNS) International Journal of Computer and Network Security,
Vol. 2, No. 5, May 2010

Packet Sent Vs. Packet Lost

The video sequence has temporal resolution 30 frames per 300

273
second, and GoP (Group of Pictures) pattern 250 237

IBBPBBPBBPBBI. In Table 1 & Table 2 shows the Total

200
amount of each frame/packet in the video sequence

Amount
149 Packet Sent
respectively. 150
Packet Los t

100

Table 1: Amount of video frames in the video source 50

9
0 1
0
Video Format Frame Number Total I P B
Packet type

I P B
Foreman QCIF 45 89 266 400
Figure 8. Sent packets vs. lost packets

Table 2: Amount of video packets in the video source

As shown in Table 5 & Fig. 9, the total number of lost video
Video Format Packet Number Total frame is 7, including 0 I frames, 1 P frames, and 6 B frames.
The Decodable Frame Rate (Q) is 0.9625, and the average
I P B
PSNR of the result video is 33.67, as shown in Fig. 10 is a
Foreman QCIF 237 149 273 659
sample of an output video frame.

Table 5: Sent frames vs. lost frames

In table 3 shows the simulation parameters of the
simulation; we simulated two different traffics which is Sent Frames Lost Frames
Video & Voice.
I P B I P B

45 89 266 0 1 6
Table 3: Simulation parameters
Simulation Video Voice
Parameter
Frame Sent Vs. Frame Lost
I -frame P-frame B- frame
300
Transport 266
Protocol UDP UDP UDP UDP 250
CWmin 3 7 15 7
CWmax 7 15 1023 15 200
Amount

AIFSN 2 3 3 4 150
Frame Sent
Frame Lost
Packet Size
89
(bytes) 1028 1028 1028 160 100

Packet Interval 45
10 ms 10 ms 10 ms 20 ms 50

Data rate 0 1 6
0
(kbps) 1024 1024 1024 64
I P B
Fra me type

Figure 9. Sent frames vs. lost frames

As shown in Table 4 & Fig. 8, the total number of lost video
packets is 10, including 0 I frames, 1 P frames, and 9 B
frames.

Table 4: Sent packets vs. lost packets

Sent Packets Lost Packets
I P B I P B Figure 10. Sample of Received video frame

237 149 273 0 1 9

 (IJCNS) International Journal of Computer and Network Security, 15
Vol. 2, No. 5, May 2010

5. Conclusions
In this paper, we evaluated a framework to improve the
quality of video streaming. This framework consists of
MAC-centric cross-layer architecture to allow MAC-layer to
retrieve video streaming packet information (slice type), to
save unnecessary packet waiting time, and a single-video
multi-level queue to prioritize I/P/B slice (packet) delivery.
We evaluated our simulations based on the decodable frame
rate (Q) and PSNR. Through simulations, we also revealed
that PSNR & decodable frame rate can evaluate the
perceived quality well by an end user. Therefore, we found
that the larger the Q & PSNR value, the better the video
quality perceived by the end user. Simulations show that the
evaluated methodology outperforms IEEE802.11e in packet
loss rate, and PSNR.

References

[1] IEEE 802.11e, “Wireless LAN Medium Access Control

(MAC) Enhancements for Quality of Service (QoS),”
802.11e Draft 8.0, 2004.
[2] S. Choi, “Overview of Emerging IEEE 802.11 Protocols
for MAC and Above,” Telecommunications Review,
Special Edition, November 2003.
[3] D. Gu, and J. Zhang, “QoS Enhancement in IEEE
802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks,” IEEE
Communications Magazine, June 2003.
[4] D. Chen, D. Gu, J. Zhang, “Supporting Real-Time
Traffic with QoS in IEEE802.11e Based Home
Networks,” IEEE Consumer Communications and
Networking Conference, January 2004.
[5] D. Gao, J. Cai, P. Bao, Z. He, “MPEG-4 Video
Streaming Quality Evaluation in IEEE802.11e
WLANs,” IEEE International Conference on Image
Processing, September 2005.
[6] A. Ksentini, A. Gueroui, M. Naimi, “Toward an
improvement of H.264 Video Transmission over
IEEE802.11e through a Cross Layer Architecture,”
IEEE Communications Magazine, Special Issue on
Cross-Layer Protocol Engineering, January 2006.
[7] Sai Shankar N, Mihaela van der Schaar, “Performance
Analysis of Video Transmission over IEEE 802.11a/e
WLANs,” IEEE Transactions on Vehicular, VOL. 56,
Issue 4, 2007.
[8] Pilgyu Shin, Kwangsue Chung, “A Cross-Layer Based
Rate Control Scheme for MPEG-4 Video Transmission
by Using Efficient Bandwidth Estimation in IEEE
802.11e,” School of Electronics Engineering,
Kwangwoon University, Seoul, Korea, 2007.
[9] NS-2, http://www.isi.edu/nsnam/ns.
[10] Chih-Heng, Ke, “How to evaluate MPEG video
transmission using the NS2 simulator,” EE
Department, NCKU, Taiwan, 2007.
[11] S. Wiethölter and C. Hoene, “Design and Verification
of An IEEE802.11e EDCF Simulation Model in ns-
2.26,” Tech. Rep. TKN-03-019, Technische Universität
Berlin, 2003.
[12] Cygwin, http://www.cygwin.com
[13] IEEE Std 802.11e-2005, “Wireless LAN Medium
Access Control (MAC) and Physical Layer (PHY)
specifications Amendment 8: Medium Access Control
(MAC) Quality of Service Enhancements,” November
2005.
[14] Zhen-ning Kong, Danny H. K. Tsang, Brahim Bensaou,
Deyun Gao, “Performance Analysis of IEEE802.11e
Contention-Based Channel Access,” IEEE JOURNAL
ON SELECTED AREAS IN COMMUNICATIONS,
VOL. 22, No. 10, December 2004.