Murillo, Carlos A.

This thesis presents the simulation based performance evaluation on the transmission of multimedia services (H.264/AVC video streaming) to a mobile user over a packet-switched wireless network based on the WCDMA standard. The H.264/AVC refers to the codec, which is used as the main tool for video compression. It enables the transport of high bandwidth video data over Third Generation (3G) wireless systems by offering a high video compression rate, adaptability to the channel, and error resilience. It is transported using the RTP/UDP/IP protocol stack over the 3G wireless system. The WCDMA technology is simulated with special emphasis on the upper layers of the wireless channel. The performance of the WCDMA system is studied when transporting RTP/UDP/IP packets of H.264/AVC compressed video data under diverse configuration scenarios, namely, ARQ schemes and variable length of the transmitted frame at the link layer. These components of a packet-switched streaming service are integrated into a software simulation model, which is used to evaluate the end-to-end H.264/AVC video quality in a WCDMA wireless network.