[RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS]


| RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS |


A*STAR researchers have developed a video Quality of Experience (QoE) scheme that can greatly improve streaming video in crowded mobile environments.


Wireless networks


THE IMPORTANCE OF BEATING BUFFERING


STREAMING VIDEO OVER MOBILE NETWORKS COULD BE GREATLY IMPROVED BY SMART PRIORITIZATION OF VISUALLY IMPORTANT DATA


By prioritizing the delivery of rich visual data, A*STAR researchers have demonstrated that the quality of streaming video can be vastly improved on even the most crowded wireless networks1. Video streaming is one of the most


demanding tasks on mobile networks, not only because of the large amount of data that needs to be transmitted, but because even the faintest stutter or artifact in video playback can dramatically degrade the experience. Network engineers are continuously looking for new


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ways to maximize video quality in increasingly congested wireless environments with many users vying for limited bandwidth. There are already methods for guaranteeing


a certain transmission rate to maintain the quality of streaming video and audio. Known as Quality of Service (QoS) protocols, these methods work well in many cases, but generally require a large allocation of bandwidth to each user, which might not be available on crowded mobile networks. Peng Hui Tan, Maodong Li and colleagues from the A*STAR Institute


for Infocomm Research instead studied how it might be possible to rate the importance of discrete video ‘packets’ to reduce the band- width needed to maintain a certain Quality of Experience, or QoE. “QoE refers to the performance metric


used to gauge the experience of the end user,” explains Tan. “We need to translate a given QoE into a set of parameters for QoS, which is then implemented in the network communication protocol. We found that by passing information across the different layers


A*STAR RESEARCH 45


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