Rate distortion optimized joint ARQ-FEC scheme for real-time wireless multimedia

In this paper, we investigate rate distortion optimized streaming of H.264 coded video sequences over time-varying wireless channels. Our main objective is to minimize average end-to-end distortion to satisfy a certain quality of service (QoS) by considering the media and channel characteristics such as packet importance, packet dependencies, decoding deadlines, channel state information and channel capacity. In particular, we propose a sender-driven optimized joint ARQ-FEC scheme that decides on packet transmissions, re-transmissions as well as the FEC rate used in each transmission. The optimized joint ARQ-FEC scheme along with packet scheduling aims to minimize a weighted sum of distortion and total transmission cost under capacity constraints. The other objective in this paper is to satisfy the QoS of the optimized joint ARQ-FEC scheme without minimizing end-to-end distortion. We improved two approximate algorithms that use the media and channel characteristics to transmit the best selected and FEC coded packet. The real-time simulation results with H.264 sequences demonstrate the efficacy of the all proposed algorithms over the classical error recovery scheme uses ARQ and FEC.