Video transmission over WiMedia-UWB using subpacket hybrid ARQ

Ultra-wideband (UWB) serves the high bandwidth demand for high definition video transmission over short-range wireless networks. Nevertheless, bursty errors due to harsh channel conditions during video transmission greatly deteriorate video quality. In order to improve the quality of video transmission over UWB, we propose the use of a subpacket based hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) scheme instead of the conventional packet based HARQ scheme. The proposed subpacket based HARQ scheme only retransmits erroneous subpackets and avoids retransmission of other correctly decoded subpackets. Simulation results show that in comparison with the conventional packet based HARQ scheme, the proposed subpacket based HARQ scheme achieves significant performance improvement in terms of delay, percentage of overhead, throughput and reconstructed video quality.