Joint H.264/SVC-MIMO rate control for wireless video transmission

In this research, we propose a novel joint H.264/SVC-MIMO rate control (RC) algorithm for video compression and transmission over Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) wireless systems. We first present system architecture for H.264/SVC compression and transmission over MIMO systems. Then, we use a packet-level two-state Markov model to estimate MIMO channel states and predict the number of retransmitted bits in the presence of automatic repeat request (ARQ). Finally, an efficient joint rate controller is proposed to regulate the output bit rate of each layer. Our extensive simulation results demonstrate that, our algorithm can respond to the sudden bandwidth fluctuation of MIMO channels, outperform JVT-W043 rate control algorithm, adopted in the H.264/SVC reference software, by providing more accurate output bit rate, reducing buffer overflow, depressing quality fluctuations, and finally, improves the overall coding quality.