Advances in Multimedia
Volume 2007 (2007), Article ID 64695, 10 pages
doi:10.1155/2007/64695
Research Article
Survival of the Fittest: An Active Queue Management Technique for Noisy Packet Flows
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), Michigan State University, East Lansing, 48824, MI, USA
Received 7 November 2006; Accepted 21 December 2006
Academic Editor: Jianfei Cai
Copyright © 2007 Shirish S. Karande et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract
We present a novel active queue management (AQM) technique to demonstrate the efficacy of practically harnessing the predictive utility of SSR indications for improved video communication. We consider a network within which corrupted packets are relayed over multiple hops, but a certain percentage of packets needs to be dropped at an intermediate node due to congestion. We propose an AQM technique, survival of the fittest (SOTF), to be employed at the relay node, within which we use packet state information, available from SSR indications and checksums, to drop packets with the highest corruption levels. On the basis of actual 802.11b measurements we show that such a side information (SI) aware processing within the network can provide significant performance benefits over an SI-unaware scheme, random queue management (RQM), which is forced to randomly discard packets. With trace-based simulations, we show the utility of the proposed AQM technique in improving the error recovery performance of cross-layer FEC schemes. Finally, with the help of H.264-based video simulations these improvements are shown to translate into a significant improvement in video quality.