Video communication over broadcast channels

This paper investigates the problem of communicating video over a broadcast channel. The broadcast channel is expressed in terms of the channel capacity that exists between the transmitter and each receiver in the broadcast area { Shannon's separation theorem does not apply for video communication over this class of channels. Digital (discrete time, discrete amplitude) and hybrid (discrete time, discrete/continuous amplitude) transmission and video coding methods are discussed. Joint source and channel coding principles are employed to e ectively couple these methods to form e cient systems for communicating video over broadcast channels. A framework is presented for characterizing and bounding the performance of these systems; the results lead to interesting directions for future work.