Cross-layer optimization for wireless video communication

Dapeng Oliver Wu, Zhihai He

Abstract: With the rapid growth of wireless networks and increasing popularity of portable video devices, wireless video communication is poised to become the enabling technology for many multimedia applications over wireless networks. Real-time wireless video transmission typically has requirements on quality of service (QoS). However, wireless channels are unreliable and the channel capacities are time-varying, which may cause severe degradation to video presentation quality. In addition, for portable devices, video compression and wireless transmission are tightly coupled through the constraints on data rate, power, and delay. These issues make it particularly challenging to design an efficient real-time video compression and wireless transmission system on a portable device. In this paper, we take a cross-layer approach to this problem; our objective is to maximize the video quality under the constraints of resource and delay. Specifically, we minimize the end-to-end video distortion under the constraints of resource and delay, over the parameters in physical, link, and application (video) layers. This formulation is general and capable of capturing the fundamental aspects of the design of wireless video communication systems. Based on this formulation, we study how the resources could be intelligently allocated to maximize the video quality and analyze the performance limits of the wireless video communication system under resource constraints.