Fine-granular-scalability video streaming over wireless LANs using cross layer error control

Real-time streaming of audiovisual content over wireless LANs (WLANs) is emerging as an important technology area in multimedia communications. Due to the error-prone, time-varying characteristics of wireless channels, there is a need for strong protection of video bitstreams. To cope with the variation of channel conditions, we introduce a novel cross-layer protection strategy that combines adaptive application-layer forward error correction (FEC) and physical-layer modulation with fine-granular-scalability (FGS) coding to improve the robustness of wireless transmission. Unlike data streams, different parts of a video stream have different priorities and hence merit the use of unequal error protection. Our schemes can dynamically select the optimal combination of FEC and modulation based on channel conditions and video data content. Experimental results show the stability of the scheme over a variety of channel conditions.