Robust transmission of MPEG-4 scalable video over 4G wireless networks

Fine-granularity-scalability (FGS) has recently been adopted by the MPEG-4 standard for the efficient and flexible distribution of multimedia over the Internet. The FGS framework is able to perform spatio-temporal-SNR tradeoffs in real-time at transmission or (post-) processing time, depending upon the available bit-rate, sequence characteristics, priority, user preferences or receiver resources, and not at encoding time. This paper investigates the usage of FGS for robust video transmission over wireless networks. To cope with the detrimental channel conditions, we introduce a novel joint source-channel coding scheme that combines FGS and adaptive modulation. Two schemes are presented, one uses hierarchical modulation and FGS and the other uses time division multiplexing and FGS. Both schemes are shown by computer simulation to maintain a stable video quality over a variety of multipath dynamic Rayleigh fading channels. The proposed adaptive modulated FGS algorithms provide a graceful degradation and improvement in picture quality as the channel conditions vary.