A method for improving the quality of mobile video under hard transcoding conditions

Mobile access to multimedia contents requires video transcoding functionality at the edge of the mobile network for interworking with heterogeneous networks and services. Under hard transcoding conditions, the bandwidth of a coded video stream needs to be drastically reduced such that the original temporal resolution cannot be maintained. Thus consecutive frame skipping is often unavoidable at the transcoder. We propose an efficient mechanism for improving the quality of service (QoS) delivered to the mobile user, by minimising consecutive frame skipping in transcoding systems. The simulation results show that a better signal quality is obtained at the receiver during hard transcoding periods.