Adaptive Error Resilience Tools for Improving the Quality of MPEG-4 Video Streams over Wireless Channels

The transmission of encoded video streams over heterogeneous networks, characterized by congestion losses in wired links and high bit error rate in the wireless channel, is under consideration in this paper. First of all, it is necessary to make a distinction between the different kinds of losses to achieve a high channel utilization. Then, when dealing with wireless losses, the robustness of the encoded stream has to be improved. This article shows an easy way of implementing a global adaptive algorithm for wireless networks. It proposes a new algorithm to adequate the parameters of video error resilience tools to the changing characteristics of the wireless channel. The aim of this algorithm is guaranteeing the quality of the video. Simplicity is the key, as the receiver of the video stream will be a handheld device (i.e. PDA, mobile phone, etc.) with limited processing capacity