A novel content-aware interleaving for wireless video transmission

In wireless network environments, the effect of transmission errors and losses on the video quality vary, depending on the intensity of the burst, and which parts of the video stream are lost. Among the existing transmission error control techniques, FEC and ARQ represent good solutions for combating transmission errors, but require redundant data. Interleaving can improve subjective video quality without wasting additional bandwidth, even though the method has no error correcting capability, because it allows spreading successive errors. In this paper, a content-aware packet-level interleaving method is proposed, which uses a quantitative index, in order to indicate the degree of content-importance of the video content, to ensure the effect of burst packet loss is distributed intelligently. The proposed scheme improves overall video quality, compared with content-blind interleaving methods. 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.