Delay-rate-distortion optimized rate control for wireless video communication

In this paper, we extend the traditional rate-distortion optimization (RDO) for the end-to-end wireless video communication system and develop a novel delay-rate-distortion optimization (dRDO) based rate control (RC) algorithm, by investigating the allocation of end-to-end delay to different delay components. Tradeoffs regarding, respectively, source coding delay versus buffering delay and available source coding rate versus redundant rate incurred by channel coding, are coupled in the proposed dRDO algorithm. It targets at minimizing the average total end-to-end distortion under the transmission rate and end-to-end delay constraints, by joint selection of search range and quantization step size in source coding and channel code rate in channel coding. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed dRDO algorithm over existing schemes.