An adaptive multi-purpose transmission scheme for H.264 encoded video in wireless networks

Abstract

Transmitting live video data is crucial in almost any surveillance application. Although the emerging research field of smart cameras promises to automate video analysis, human operators are still required to initiate the according actions in the case of an alarm. Therefore, it is important to have high-quality real-time video of the corresponding scenes. Usually, video data also has to be archived for later analysis. This paper presents a novel transmission scheme for encoded video data which allows for low-latency transmissions as it is required for live watching and reliable transmissions for archiving simultaneously in a single connection. The proposed transmission scheme uses SCTP as transport layer protocol and is designed for H.264 encoded video, but can be adapted to other video encoding standards as well. The real-world evaluation shows that this novel transmission scheme is competitive to the widely used RTP/UDP method. When incorporating limited bandwidth and packet- loss our approach outperforms RTP/UDP regarding the number of received frames as well as quality of the perceived video.