Evaluación y comparación de códecs de video para el despliegue de un sistema de comunicación resiliente

Abstract

In emergency scenarios, it is usually difficult to rely on network infrastructure, especially in remote or geographically difficult-to-access locations. However, it is necessary to have tools to communicate or assess the situation. Therefore, ad hoc networks emerge as an option to solve this problem. This paper proposes the development of an emergency communication system for the transmission of multimedia traffic in a real scenario, between the different floors of a building. For this purpose, multiple experiments were carried out to determine the values of fundamental metrics (e.g., packet loss, delay, and throughput) for real-time audio and video transmission. Specifically, open-source tools were developed with the ability to extract the required metrics and objectively compare video quality using current encoding mechanisms (e.g., VP8, VP9, H.264, H.265). The results obtained show that VP8 is the most suitable codec for the proposed scenario. In addition, a videoconferencing tool was developed with the ability to adapt the video characteristics (e.g., bitrate) according to the network conditions.