QoS aware mobile video communications

Networked real time video applications in a wireless and mobile environment bring a new level of collaboration and communication to the future battlefield. Providing video services with certain deterministic guarantees in a resource limited and error prone wireless network is a challenge. The inefficiency of bandwidth utilization and degradation of quality of service (QoS) are the issues have to be considered. To solve these problems this paper proposes a "QoS aware selective repeat automatic repeat request (QSR-ARQ)" scheme. This scheme not only utilizes the layer properties of Motion Picture Expert Group (MPEG) compressed video frames and their QoS requirements to increase bandwidth efficiency, but also considers the timing boundaries of different data sections in the video frames to achieve high receiving quality. A priority-based scheduler is also proposed. This scheduler is used in conjunction with the QSR-ARQ to achieve low delay and high throughput without sacrificing video quality. A computer simulation was used to compare the performance of the proposed protocol with a conventional SR-ARQ. An asymmetric implementation is also considered for both sender and receiver with different complexity requirements. The potential military application is that combat soldiers may use this scheme to receive real time video information.