Evaluation of Error Resilience Mechanisms for 3G Conversational Video

Communication in 3G networks may experience packet losses due to transmission errors on the wireless link(s) which may severely impact the quality of video services, with conversational video being most challenging to repair due to tighter delay constraints. Many error resilience mechanisms have been developed that can be applied at the source (codec) level and transport/application layer to address these challenges. Their respective performance varies depending on the network conditions. This paper analyzes and compares the performance of four error resilience mechanisms under different realistic wireless link conditions: selective retransmissions, slice size adaptation, reference picture selection, and unequal error protection using packet-based forward error correction. We derive suggestions for the applicability of the individual mechanisms.