Providing unequal reliability for transmitting layered video streams over wireless networks by multi-ARQ schemes

As the progress in cellular communications, video transmission over wireless links is getting more important. To achieve this, one of the most important problems have to be solved is to protect video quality against burst errors due to channel fading and jamming. In this paper, an ARQ scheme called Multi-ARQ and its associated rescheduling method for transmitting video streams over wireless channels are proposed. Based on the concept of unequal protection, we use ARQ-scheme with higher reliability for higher sensitive portions of video data. Thus the overall video quality is well protected against transmission errors in wireless channel and the delay and buffer size needed for possible retransmission can be minimized. The proposed approach can also be combined with the channel coding approach and the error concealment approach to get better video quality