EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing 
Volume 2006 (2006), Article ID 28919, 14 pages
doi:10.1155/ASP/2006/28919

Source-Adaptation-Based Wireless Video Transport: A Cross-Layer Approach

Qi Qu,1 Yong Pei,2 James W. Modestino,3 and Xusheng Tian3

 1Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla 92093-0407, CA, USA
2Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Wright State University, Dayton 45435, OH, USA
3Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Miami, Coral Gables 33124, FL, USA
Received 25 February 2005; Revised 23 August 2005; Accepted 26 August 2005

Abstract

Real-time packet video transmission over wireless networks is expected to experience bursty packet losses that can cause substantial degradation to the transmitted video quality. In wireless networks, channel state information is hard to obtain in a reliable and timely manner due to the rapid change of wireless environments. However, the source motion information is always available and can be obtained easily and accurately from video sequences. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel cross-layer framework that exploits only the motion information inherent in video sequences and efficiently combines a packetization scheme, a cross-layer forward error correction (FEC)-based unequal error protection (UEP) scheme, an intracoding rate selection scheme as well as a novel intraframe interleaving scheme. Our objective and subjective results demonstrate that the proposed approach is very effective in dealing with the bursty packet losses occurring on wireless networks without incurring any additional implementation complexity or delay. Thus, the simplicity of our proposed system has important implications for the implementation of a practical real-time video transmission system.