ORBit: an adaptive data shaping technique for robust wireless video clip communication

With the introduction of the low-bitrate video compression standard, MPEG-4, and high bandwidth wireless technologies such as 3G Wireless and WLAN, video communication over wireless channels will soon become a widespread and often used technology. However, video communication generally requires stable and well-known communication conditions, while wireless conditions can vary quickly and dramatically. In this paper, we focus on a specific type of video, video clips, and propose a method, Out-of-oRder Buffering (ORBit), which helps to maintain a high quality of received video under widely varying wireless conditions. We introduce an algorithm which judiciously selects information to buffer which will help improve the video quality of the entire video clip. Our results show a significant increase (up to 5 dB) in received video quality by using ORBit to achieve robust video clip communication. We also demonstrate that the proposed scheme imposes only a marginal computational overhead on the wireless handheld, thus making the approach feasible for typically CPU-constrained wireless handhelds.