A highly efficient, low delay architecture for transporting H.264 video over wireless channel

Transporting hybrid coded video over wireless channel is very challenging. On the one hand, wireless link is much more error prone than wired network due to time varying channel conditions such as fading and multipath interference. On the other hand, hybrid coded video is very vulnerable to error propagation when transmitted over error prone channels. Numerous researches have been conducted to enhance error robustness for wireless video transmission. Among them, many schemes use retransmission to reduce packet loss rate and improve reconstructed video quality. However, retransmission is delay constrained due to the low delay nature of real-time video. Packet loss is inevitable even when retransmission is employed. In the proposed architecture, a novel error recovery scheme is introduced which switches adaptively between ACK and NACK modes according to channel conditions. Video proxy server at the base station is designed to make the retransmission and feedback based error recovery method more effective. State-of-the-art H.264 is used as video encoder since it provides not only high coding efficiency but also multi-frame which plays a key role in the framework. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of this architecture.