Source-adaptive FEC/UEP coding for video transport over bursty packet loss 3G UMTS networks: a cross-layer approach

Packet video transmission over wireless networks is expected to experience packet losses due to noise, interference, multipath and the motion of mobile hosts. Such packet losses often occur in bursts which may cause substantial degradation to the transmitted video quality. We propose use of a cross-layer unequal error protection (UEP) approach, based on adaptation to source information, which is achieved by assigning an unequal amount of forward error correction (FEC) to each group of link-layer packets according to the corresponding motion level of the slice acquired at the application layer. Also, a novel packetization scheme and an intra-frame packet interleaving scheme are proposed to be used together with FEC/UEP in order to combat the bursty packet losses expected in 3G wireless environments. Our results demonstrate that the proposed approach is very effective in dealing with the packet losses occurring on wireless networks without incurring any additional implementation complexity or extra delay.