Cross-layer Adaptive H.264/AVC Streaming over IEEE 802.11e Experimental Testbed

In recent years, the rapid development of wireless communication allows us to enjoy more multimedia services via wireless network. However, due to lack of QoS support and characteristics of wireless channel, there are still many challenges in wireless video streaming. In this paper, we implement a cross-layer architecture to enhance the QoS transmission of h. 264/AVC video stream in IEEE 802.11e wireless environment. Cross-layer Adaptive Video Prioritization (CAVP) provides Application layer Video Frame Prioritization (VFP), which prioritizes packet according to PSNR influence level, and MAC-layer Adaptive Prioritization (MAP), which estimates the delay time of each access category (AC) and chooses the faster one. We also show the results of the experiments on real testbed. Our cross-layer architecture has better performance than the works before, especially when the channel is congested.