Performance study of robust wireless video transmission over fading channels

We study the robust transmission of video over wireless cellular channels. The source video is coded based on the H.263 standard for low bit rate coding where the transmission rate is limited to 64 kb/s and below. Due to the nature of burst errors in fading channels, the video communication system needs to be robustly designed. Unnecessary overheads should be prevented because of the limited bandwidth of wireless channels. The techniques of automatic repeat request (ARQ) and forward error correction (FEC) are employed. It is shown that to obtain the same video quality, the ARQ system requires less overhead than FEC. Our simulation gives the results in favor of using ARQ for error control rather than FEC at a bit error rate of 10/sup -3/ under the channel environment stated in the IS-95 standard.