Underground experiments of video transmission over an IEEE 802.11 infrastructure

This paper presents research work done within the framework of the deployment of a wireless communications network in an underground mine. A wireless local area network based on the 802.11 standard is considered with the goal of transmitting in real time voice, video and data from mobile units. The proposed approach for video transmission consists of implementing a low complexity codec based on the ITU-T H.26L standard. A flexible and original architecture has been implemented for real time control and transport of multimedia. This architecture includes provisions for quality of service (QoS). Tests have been performed in a real mine environment in order to guide the research efforts for improving QoS.