Simulation platform for fast video quality evaluation of H.264/AVC and SVC transmission on error prone channels

Video transmission systems for IPTV, mobile TV or conversational video communication services are constantly subject to investigations regarding service reliability, quality of service, quality of experience, or bandwidth efficiency. The multitude of influencing parameters in terms of channel settings, error protection or media coding turns optimal setup into a challenge. Simulating video transmission is an important instrument to assess new developments and optimize settings in the first place, but existing solutions demand high computational capacity to provide application-level evaluations, such as peak signal-to-noise ratio. The required video decoding consumes a substantial part of the overall simulation runtime. In this paper, we present a simulation platform that utilizes the architecture of H.264/AVC and SVC to provide a fast and accurate video quality evaluation on packet level with application-level metrics. The presented approach significantly reduces overall runtime in the evaluation phase of large simulation sets. The underlying mechanisms are explained and their benefit in terms of time savings and accuracy is analyzed based on an exemplary simulation of a mobile broadcast scenario.