Video transmission for third generation wireless communication systems

This paper presents a twin-class unequal protected video transmission system over wireless channels. Video partitioning based on a separation of the Variable Length Coded (VLC) Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) coefficients within each block is considered for constant bitrate transmission (CBR). In the splitting process the fraction of bits assigned to each of the two partitions is adjusted according to the requirements of the unequal error protection scheme employed. Subsequently, partitioning is applied to the ITU-T H.263 coding standard. As a transport vehicle, we have considered one of the leading third generation cellular radio standards known as WCDMA. A dual-priority transmission system is then invoked on the WCDMA system where the video data, after being broken into two streams, is unequally protected. We use a very simple error correction coding scheme for illustration and then propose more sophisticated forms of unequal protection of the digitized video signals. We show that this strategy results in a significantly higher quality of the reconstructed video data when it is transmitted over time-varying multipath fading channels.