IEEE greenlights new standard project to support enhanced quality of real-time mobile video communications

2012 International CES, LAS VEGAS, USA: IEEE, the world's largest professional association advancing technology for humanity, announced that the IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA) Standards Board has approved work to begin on IEEE P1907.1 – Standard for Network-Adaptive Quality of Experience (QoE) Management Scheme for Real-Time Mobile Video Communications.

IEEE P1907.1 is intended to elevate the quality of mobile video communications and help network operators, application developers, service/content providers and end users to develop, deploy and utilize collaborative services that employ real-time, two-way and multi-party video connectivity within any mobile browser, application, game, device or service platform.

The first meeting of the IEEE P1907.1 Working Group is scheduled for March 2012 in Piscataway, N.J.

“The goal of IEEE P1907.1 is to help raise the bar for real-time mobile video communications, ultimately resulting in a richer and more satisfying end-user experience,” said John Ralston, chair of the IEEE P1907.1 Working Group. “By tackling real-time video capture, transmission and monitoring of received video quality, IEEE P1907.1 is intended to facilitate a high-quality real-time mobile video user experience within the constraints of mobile devices and networks.”

Real-time video connectivity is becoming a key feature in a wide range of mobile services, including communications, corporate collaboration, social networking, gaming and entertainment. However, unlike broadcast video that is shot in controlled production environments, processed for optimal quality and transmitted via stable, one-way communication networks, mobile video must contend with multiple QoE challenges.

With mobile networks in a constant state of flux and impacted by issues such as latency, jitter and packet loss, real-time mobile video can be subject to signal degradation during transmission.

“The massive popularity of consumer-created video shared through such social-media sites as Facebook and YouTube has crystallized the clear need for a leap forward in the quality levels of real-time mobile video,” said Judith Gorman, managing director, IEEE-SA. “IEEE P1907.1 has been launched to support the efficient utilization of resource-constrained mobile networks and end-to-end QoE management that will be necessary to achieve such an improvement.”

Sponsored by the IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc), the foremost international forum for the exchange of ideas on communications and information networking, IEEE P1907.1 is being developed to help address these challenges and boost the quality of real-time mobile video by defining mechanisms addressing:

* measurement and reporting of in-transit and received real-time video signal quality;
* real-time, device- and network-based feedback control mechanisms for better detection of and adaptability to network fluctuations, and
* human visual perception-based metrics that take into account user device capabilities and other subjective factors.