Video communication over broadcast channels

This paper investigates the problem of communicating video over a broadcast channel. The broadcast channel is expressed in terms of the channel capacity that exists between the transmitter and each receiver in the broadcast area-Shannon´s separation theorem does not apply for video communication over this class of channels. Digital (discrete time, discrete amplitude) and hybrid (discrete time, discrete/continuous amplitude) transmission and video coding methods are discussed. Joint source and channel coding principles are employed to effectively couple these methods to form efficient systems for communicating video over broadcast channels. A framework is presented for characterizing and bounding the performance of these systems; the results lead to interesting directions for future work.