Video conference over HF packet radio channels

The recent rapid growth of multimedia communications has efficiently allowed delivering different services, formats and contents over an enormous variety of digital networks with IP acting as an integration protocol. The main objective of this research work is to evaluate the performance of a high frequency (HF) wireless network for transporting multimedia services. Beyond of allowing civil/amateur communications, HF bands are also used for long distance wireless military communications. Therefore, our work is based on NATO link and physical layer standards, STANAG 5066 and STANAG 4539 respectively. A typical transmission bandwidth is about 3 kHz with the resulting throughput bit rate up to 12800 bps. This very low bit rate by itself imposes serious challenges for reliable real time multimedia communications. This paper describes a complete video conference system designed to allow an end-to-end communication through "best effort" networks.