Analysis of IEEE 802.11N-Like Transmission Techniques with and Without Prior CSI for Video Applications

Previous research into MIMO systems has focused little on optimisation for video transmission. In terms of multimedia transmission, spatial multiplexing (SM) is commonly proposed as the most suitable MIMO technique. Most SM-based video transport schemes look to exploit the multiplexing gain, which comes at the expense of a relatively high SNR, unless the channel state is known at the transmitter. Space-time block coding (STBC) is an attractive technique that does not provide the mapping flexibility of SM techniques, but does dramatically reduce the packet-error rate. This paper compares these techniques in terms of decoded video quality through simulations based on practical transmission scenarios. The use of multiple-description coding (MDC) is further proposed to provide a new class of wireless video transmission algorithms.