A Real-Time Mobile Newsgathering and Broadcasting System Using MPEG-2 over Wireless LAN 802.11b

We introduce a newsgathering system that features high mobility and wide-area coverage: Mobile Broadcasting Video (MBV) system. According to the original design concept, this system’s transmission channels provide increased mobility and wide area coverage, utilizing wireless LAN and low-orbit satellite technology. Also this system provides audiovisual quality that is comparable to current digital TV applications, adopting the MPEG-2 standard coding. To provide a robust mobile newsgathering and broadcasting system, the transmission channels should be stable and the system itself should be well equipped to counteract to various changes during broadcasting situations. To check the suitability of the prototype system design, especially the wireless channel for high-rate multimedia transmission, we mainly focused on digital data acquisition from analog live sources and fast delivery of compressed data over wireless LAN. The experimental results demonstrate that an economical, high-quality, realtime solution for mobile newsgathering and broadcasting is realizable using wireless LAN 802.11b within proper parameters. We also introduced a simple and effective error concealment scheme that works on MPEG2 Systems (Transport Stream) level. This scheme increases subjective played-back visual quality in the case of frame losses.