Channel-adaptive video transmission using H.264 SVC over mobile WiMAX network

The quality of video transmission over mobile worldwide interoperability for microwave access (WiMAX) network can be severely degraded due to the effect of fading and handoff. To cope with this problem, we propose a channel-adaptive video transmission method using H.264 scalable video coding (SVC) in this paper, which not only dynamically extracts the layer of bit stream based on the available channel bandwidth (ACBW), but also minimizes the error propagation during handoff. Firstly, the ACBW and the handoff in the mobile WiMAX are estimated by analyzing channel parameters including the carrier to interference and noise ratio (CINR). Secondly, the streaming server extracts the next transmission layer according to the estimated ACBW to support the better quality and controls the smart frame skipping adaptively based on the handoff detection. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method can improve the performance of the video streaming over mobile WiMAX network.