Encapsulation and marking of MPEG-4 video over IP differentiated services

Traditional IP networks offer users best-effort service. In this model, all user packets compete equally for network resources. Much attention is being given to developing IP QoS (quality of service), which allows network operators to offer differing levels of treatment to user packets. In this article, we investigate QoS interaction provisioning between MPEG-4 video applications and IP DiffServ networks. QoS interaction is performed through intelligent encapsulation and marking of MPEG-4 elementary streams (video, audio, signaling, scenes and object descriptors) on IP Diffserv's AF/EF per hop behavior. Our contribution to this issue is twofold: first, we analyze the different proposals for MPEG-4 encapsulation protocols over RTP/IP; and second, we propose and evaluate a video-oriented marking mechanism for IP Diffserv edge routers. A performance evaluation is carried through simulation using ns2.