Joint Diversity- and Rate-Control for Video Transmission on Multi-Antenna Channels

Video transmitted over fading wireless channels incurs both encoder-induced distortion and distortion caused by transmission errors. To address these problems, we propose a framework to transmit video reliably over a multi-antenna wireless system. No assumptions are made about specific video-coding standards, except that the encoder employs some variation of motion-compensated block-transform coding. To minimize the total distortion, the scheme optimizes the recently- derived diversity and multiplexing trade-off available on multi-antenna systems. Moreover, this is done jointly with loss-aware rate-distortion optimization (LA-RDO) techniques at the video encoder. Besides minimizing distortion, the algorithm also ensures that delay and buffer constraints are satisfied for real-time transport. We show that problem can be modelled as a short sequence of geometric programs. The overall complexity is linear in the number of antennas. Numerical results with H.264-coded video show that the PSNR at the video-decoder can be improved by various amounts, depending on antenna configuration.