Improving the robustness of MPEG-4 video communications over wireless/3G mobile networks

Two major issues in providing true end-to-end wireless/mobile video capabilities are: interoperability among network platforms and robustness of video compression algorithms in error-prone environments. In this paper, we mainly focus on the second issue and show how error resilience techniques can be used to improve the video quality. We argue that the error resilient tools provided within the MPEG-4 standard are not sufficient to provide acceptable quality in wireless/mobile networks, but that this quality can be significantly improved by the inclusion of hierarchical MPEG-4 video coding techniques. We present a novel hierarchical MPEG-4 video scheme particularly designed for video communications over QoS-capable wireless/mobile network.