Adaptive GOP Bit Allocation to Provide Seamless Video Streaming in Vertical Handoff

Vertical handoff is required to offer users the capability of achieving anywhere and anytime internet access with the full service support from interoperability between third generation (3G) and wireless LAN (WLAN) network. However, video data can be lost due to latency caused by vertical handoff. To solve this problem, in this paper, we propose an efficient GOP bit allocation method to provide seamless video streaming in vertical handoff. In the proposed method, the streaming server first predicts the network status by using the wireless channel modeling and then adaptively performs bit allocation for a group of pictures (GOP) to adapt video delivery to vertical handoff scenario. Experimental results show that the proposed method can provide significant improvement to video streaming performance, in terms of users-perceive video quality, and robustness against the latency and packet loss caused by vertical handoff.