Performance Comparison of H.264/AVC and HEVC Standards over LTE Networks

Long Term Evolution (LTE) is a standard for wireless communication developed by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) with an aim to fulfill the requirements defined for the fourth generation (4G) wireless networks. With more than hundred service providers across the globe and around one billion subscribers predicted by the year 2016, LTE is set to become the first true global standard. With the high data rates supported by LTE, improvements like Content Distribution Network (CDN) and increase in router switching speeds, popularity of video streaming services over the mobile networks is set to touch a new high. This popularity provides opportunity to the network operators to increase their revenues, but it also challenges them to provide video streams with minimum desirable quality to their customers. This has led to the emergence of two popular single layer video coding standards namely, H.264/AVC and more recently H.265/High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). With LTE being projected as a candidate to fuel the future 4G services, it is desirable to evaluate the performance of these two video coding standards over the LTE networks. The first part of this project tries to evaluate the video quality offered by these two video coding standards over LTE network by studying the impact of delay, distance and number of users in the LTE cell. In the second part of this project we implement a frame dropping mechanism which drops low priority frames of the video encoded with hierarchical B-frame structure when the channel conditions are not ideal, thus providing graceful degradation to the single layer videos. This mechanism tries to exploit the fact that in a video that is encoded using a hierarchical structure, the loss of a frame that belongs to the higher indexed temporal layer of a video has less negative impact on the video quality in comparison to the loss of a frame in the lower indexed temporal layer.