Transmission of streaming video over an EGPRS wireless network

We investigate the transmission of H.263-based streaming video over packet-switched bearers of an enhanced general packet radio services (EGPRS) cellular network. We assume a limited amount of interaction between the mobile video client and the server, consisting of video rate and resilience selection at the beginning of each session. We find that there is a large variability of perceived video quality among users. We also find that the following features are important to improving the perceived video quality: (i) using dynamic channel assignment and link-layer retransmissions in EGPRS; and (ii) choosing the video rate and resilience on a user-by-user basis. We propose a simple algorithm for the rate selection, and find that this is quite effective