H.264/SVC Multiple Description Coded Video Transmission over MIMO System with Power Control Based Antenna Selection

Improvements in transmitted video quality are achievable by utilizing multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems for transmission of multiple description coded (MDC) video. For a particular MDC scheme, the improvements heavily depend on the selection of the underlying MIMO system. This paper proposes using a MIMO system with power control based antenna selection. Simulations show that the proposed system significantly outperforms the existing MDC/MIMO combinations in the literature and extends the range of channel signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) values for which video of given quality can be transmitted. Quality improvements result from MIMO power control which allows transmissions over available MIMO antennas only for sufficiently high channel gains (effectively preventing transmissions that result in video packet loss) and guarantees equal channel performance in terms of the bit error rate (BER) for all the balanced descriptions of equal importance.