Performance evaluation of UDP lite for cellular video

Abstract

The current generation of wireless links pose a significant challenge for sending video streams, as these links have low bit rate and high error rate compared to wired links. Sending high bit rate delay-sensitive traffic over wireless links requires appropriate error resilient video compression algorithms and transport/link layer protocols. We have built a wireless video system using an off-the-shelf error resilient low bit rate video codec with our implementations of UDP Lite and PPP Lite, which are modifications to transport and link layer protocols respectively. The flexible checksumming schemes in these protocols allow error-resilient application policies to be reflected in the networking stack. We conducted simulations and experimental evaluations of this wireless video system using quantitative performance metrics (i.e., throughput, jitter, packet loss, and end-to-end latency).