Improving video transmission on the Internet

The increasing demand for high quality multimedia distribution on the Internet is encouraging research on how to improve the delivered video quality through Internet-protocol-based (IP) networks. Decoding the video quality offers low but standard video quality, while decoding the base layer together with additional enhancement layers provides further refinement to video quality. The video-traffic trace is an abstraction of the real-video stream, which typically gives the frame number, frame type, and frame size in a text file to describe the characteristics of real-video traffic. A generalized simulation and evaluation framework for video transmission is an important and useful tool to the video-coding or networking-research community. This framework can provide simulation results, including network-level metrics, and application-level metrics such as peak-signal noise ratio (PSNR), to the video coding or networking people to make them better understand their proposed design.