Reliable wireless video transmission via fading channel estimation and adaptation

|Quality of video transmitted over time-varying wireless channels relies heavily on the coordinated e ort to cope with both channel and source variations dynamically. Given the priority of each source packet and the estimated channel condition, an adaptive protection scheme based on joint source-channel criteria is investigated via proactive forward error correction (FEC). With proactive FEC in Reed Solomon (RS)/ Rate-compatible punctured convolutional (RCPC) codes, we study a practical algorithm to match the relative priority of source packets and instantaneous channel conditions. The channel condition is estimated to capture the long-term fading e ect in terms of the averaged SNR over a preset window. Proactive protection is performed for each packet based on the joint source-channel criteria with special attention to the accuracy, time-scale match, and feedback delay of channel status estimation. The overall gain of the proposed protection mechanism is demonstrated in terms of the end-to-end wireless video performance.