Cross-Layer Transmission Scheme for Wireless H.264 Using Distortion Measure and MAC-Level Error-Control

Video transmission over wireless channels has been a challenging task since it is difficult to adapt the video stream requiring relatively high bandwidth and low latency to band- limited and frequent bit/packet error-prone physical channels. There have been a lot of research activities to improve the end- video quality in wireless video transmission over the error-prone network environments. In this paper, we propose a distortion measure of encoded H.264 slice and a cross-layer UEP scheme using the proposed distortion measure. In addition, we propose a MAC-level ARQ scheme combined with FEC to improve that of the IEEE 802.11 legacy WLAN. The proposed MAC-level ARQ scheme is utilized in the cross-layer UEP scheme to improve transmission efficiency. The performance of the proposed cross- layer UEP scheme is demonstrated in comparison with a generic EEP scheme.