Variance-aware distortion estimation for wireless video communications

T i e problem of encoding and transmitting a video sequence over a wireless channel is considered. Our objective is to minimize the end-to-end didortimi while using a limited amount of transmission etierw and delay. In our approach. we jointly adapt thc source-codi~g parameters and transmission power per packet. We introduce the concept of “Variance-Aware Distortion Estimation” (VADE), and presenl a framework for controlling both the expected value and the variance of the endto-etid distortion This hmnework is based UII knowledge ofhow the video is compressed, the probability of packet lass. mid the concealnient strategy. To the hest of our knowledge. this paper is the fist to address the trade-off between the niean and variance of the end-to-end distortion. Experunental results demonstrate the potential ofthe propo~ed approach