Finite-horizon FEC-rate adaptation for real-time wireless multimedia

In this work, we propose an error-control technique for efficient streaming of packetized multimedia over time-varying wireless channels. Our objective is to obtain maximum media presentation quality for a given channel capacity. In the proposed technique, forward error correction (FEC) redundancy rate of media packets are optimized based on a distortion model. Such multimedia-source and channel characteristics as the packet importance, dependencies, decoding deadlines and channel state information are utilized in the optimization process. In addition, we also consider the effect of residual channel resources for future transmissions on the overall quality. Real-time streaming simulations with H.263+ video sequences show that the proposed technique achieves up to 1.8 dB quality improvement over nonoptimized error control methods.