Supporting Live Video on Ad Hoc Wireless Networks: Unbalanced Multiple Description Coding, Single Path Transport and Recursive Error Concealment

Robust transmission of live video over ad hoc wireless networks presents new challenges: high bandwidth requirements are coupled with delay constraints; nodes are constrained in processing power and storage capacity; ad hoc wireless networks suffer from bursty packet losses that drastically degrade the viewing experience. Accordingly, we propose a simple, but practical unbalanced multiple description (UMD) codec that uses single path transport only. At the UMD decoder, the lost Low- Resolution (LR) frames can be receded from the corresponding ones of the correctly received High- Resolution (HR) stream. This makes LR more robust to packet losses and ensures continuous video playback. The simulation results show that the proposed UMD codec has higher decoded quality, smaller quality fluctuation and lower probability of pause than other error resilience techniques, especially when channel burstiness becomes large. We also propose a novel sequence-based error concealment (EC) algorithm for our UMD decoder. It recursively uses multi-frame recovery principle to frame-by-frame reduce error drift in the HR description with respect to the LR description. In fact, the algorithm can be applied to most UMD schemes. It has the advantage of working on integer-, half- or quarter- pixel precision and looking backward without buffering future frames. Experimental results show that error decreases the fastest if the UMD decoder uses our EC algorithm. It can provide satisfactory performance on both objective and subjective evaluation.