Wireless video streaming over integrated 3G and WLAN networks

Media streaming is a popular application demanding high data rates and hard delay constraints. These requirements raise great challenges in the wireless environment, where signal fading, noise interference and network congestion introduce data losses or corruptions. Today, the availability of the Third Generation (3G) wireless system and the Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) provides a broader bandwidth to cater for multimedia application. Different characteristics of 3G and WLAN networks result in different attributes in video streaming applications. In this paper, we propose a collaborative scheme across 3G and WLAN networks for video streaming, using layered video coding and Unequal Error Protection (UEP) to improve the perceived video quality.