Dynamic parallel TCP for scalable video streaming over MIMO wireless networks

Video streaming over wireless (networks) has gained popularity in recent times with the development of 3G and 4G mobile networks. The demand and market for video based services is expected to grow substantially in the future. When UDP is used for video streaming, the inherent unreliability of UDP frequently results in corrupted video packets and jitter during video playback. Such an aberration is especially pronounced in wireless networks due to the fading and multipath interference impediments in wireless channels. TCP based video transmission provides reliability at the cost of severely increased delay arising from frequent retransmissions in case of packet error over wireless links and constraints from session and application layers for in-sequence delivery. These delays are substantially worsened in low SNR (signal-to-noise power ratio) wireless environments. Multiple TCP connections, which efficiently utilize the bandwidth of the wireless channel, have been demonstrated to yield significantly improved quality of video streaming over wireless channels while enhancing the reliability of video delivery compared to UDP. In this paper we propose a new scalable hierarchical wavelet decomposition based layered video coding over parallel TCP scheme for reliable video transmission over MIMO wireless channels while reducing the delay and jitter of video streaming.