Joint data compression and error protection for collaborative transmission

This paper addresses the problem of efficient and robust transmission of video over a hierarchical wireless infrastructure. First, we compress the data generated by the video sources using a multi-resolution wavelet coder. Subsequently, the generated bitstreams are transmitted over a wireless infrastructure to multiple regional processing centers (RPC), which then send the distorted bitstreams to a common higher-level processing center/receiver. We propose a symmetric framework for the joint compression and error protection of the correlated video bitstreams received by the RPC. We show that significantly improved video performance can be obtained by our framework over a variety of channel conditions.