Progressive video delivery over wideband wireless channels using space-time differentially coded OFDM systems

Progressive video delivery over wireless networks is very challenging due to the time-varying nature of wireless channels and limited power in the mobile devices. This paper proposes an end-to-end architecture for multilayer progressive video delivery over space-time differentially coded orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (STDC-OFDM) systems. An input video sequence is compressed by 3D-ESCOT into a layered bitstream. We input multiple layers of the bitstream in series to a STDC-OFDM channel. Different video source layers are protected by different error protection schemes in order to achieve unequal error protection. In progressive transmission, the reconstruction quality is important not only at the target transmission rate but also at the intermediate rates. So, the error protection strategy needs to optimize the average performance over the set of intermediate rates. We propose to use progressive joint source-channel coding to generate operational transmission distortion-rate (TD-R) functions and operational transmission distortion-power (TD-P) functions for multiple layers before forming the operational transmission distortion-power-rate (TD-PR) surfaces. Lagrange multipliers are then employed on the fly to obtain the optimal power allocation and optimal rate allocation among multiple layers, subject to constraints on the total transmission rate and the total power level. Progressive joint source-channel coding offers the scalability feature to handle bandwidth variations and changes in channel conditions. By extending the rate-distortion function in source coding to the TD-PR surface in joint source-channel coding, our work can use the "equal slope" argument to effectively solve the transmission rate allocation problem as well as the transmission power allocation problem for multilayer video transmission. Experiments show that our scheme achieves significant improvement over a nonoptimal system with the same total power level and total transmission rate.