74 research outputs found
Error resilient packet switched H.264 video telephony over third generation networks.
Real-time video communication over wireless networks is a challenging problem because
wireless channels suffer from fading, additive noise and interference, which translate
into packet loss and delay. Since modern video encoders deliver video packets with
decoding dependencies, packet loss and delay can significantly degrade the video quality
at the receiver. Many error resilience mechanisms have been proposed to combat packet
loss in wireless networks, but only a few were specifically designed for packet switched
video telephony over Third Generation (3G) networks.
The first part of the thesis presents an error resilience technique for packet switched
video telephony that combines application layer Forward Error Correction (FEC) with
rateless codes, Reference Picture Selection (RPS) and cross layer optimization. Rateless
codes have lower encoding and decoding computational complexity compared to traditional
error correcting codes. One can use them on complexity constrained hand-held
devices. Also, their redundancy does not need to be fixed in advance and any number of
encoded symbols can be generated on the fly. Reference picture selection is used to limit
the effect of spatio-temporal error propagation. Limiting the effect of spatio-temporal
error propagation results in better video quality. Cross layer optimization is used to
minimize the data loss at the application layer when data is lost at the data link layer.
Experimental results on a High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) network simulator for
H.264 compressed standard video sequences show that the proposed technique achieves
significant Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Percentage Degraded Video Duration
(PDVD) improvements over a state of the art error resilience technique known as
Interactive Error Control (IEC), which is a combination of Error Tracking and feedback
based Reference Picture Selection. The improvement is obtained at a cost of higher
end-to-end delay.
The proposed technique is improved by making the FEC (Rateless code) redundancy
channel adaptive. Automatic Repeat Request (ARQ) is used to adjust the redundancy
of the Rateless codes according to the channel conditions. Experimental results show
that the channel adaptive scheme achieves significant PSNR and PDVD improvements
over the static scheme for a simulated Long Term Evolution (LTE) network.
In the third part of the thesis, the performance of the previous two schemes is
improved by making the transmitter predict when rateless decoding will fail. In this
case, reference picture selection is invoked early and transmission of encoded symbols
for that source block is aborted. Simulations for an LTE network show that this results
in video quality improvement and bandwidth savings.
In the last part of the thesis, the performance of the adaptive technique is improved
by exploiting the history of the wireless channel. In a Rayleigh fading wireless channel,
the RLC-PDU losses are correlated under certain conditions. This correlation is
exploited to adjust the redundancy of the Rateless code and results in higher Rateless
code decoding success rate and higher video quality. Simulations for an LTE network
show that the improvement was significant when the packet loss rate in the two wireless
links was 10%.
To facilitate the implementation of the proposed error resilience techniques in practical
scenarios, RTP/UDP/IP level packetization schemes are also proposed for each
error resilience technique.
Compared to existing work, the proposed error resilience techniques provide better
video quality. Also, more emphasis is given to implementation issues in 3G networks
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