Coding scheme for wireless video transport with reduced frame skipping

We investigate the scenario of using the Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) retransmission scheme for two-way low bit-rate video communications over wireless Rayleigh fading channels. We show that during the retransmissions of error packets, due to the reduced channel throughput, the video encoder buffer may fill-up quickly and cause the TMN8 rate-control algorithm to significantly reduce the bits allocated to each video frame. This results in Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) degradation and many skipped frames. To reduce the number of frames skipped, in this paper we propose a coding scheme which takes into consideration the effects of the video buffer fill-up, an a priori channel model, the channel feedback information, and hybrid ARQ/FEC. The simulation results indicate that our proposed scheme encode the video sequences with much fewer frame skipping and with higher PSNR compared to H.263 TMN8.