Progressive Pseudo-analog Transmission for Mobile Video Streaming

We propose a progressive pseudo-analog video transmission scheme that simultaneously handles SNR and bandwidth variations with graceful quality degradation for mobile video streaming. With the inherited SNR-adaptability from pseudo-analog transmission, the proposed progressive solution acquires bandwidth adaptability through an innovative scheduling algorithm with optimal power allocation. The basic idea is to aggressively transmit or retransmit important coefficients so that distortion is minimized at the receiver after each received packet. We derive the closed-form expression of reduced distortion for each packet under given transmission power and known channel conditions, and show that the optimal solution can be obtained with a water-filling algorithm. We also illustrate through analyses and simulations that a near-optimal solution can be found through approximation when only statistical channel information is available. Simulations show that our solution approaches the performance upper bound of pseudo-analog transmission in an additive white Gaussian noise channel and significantly outperforms existing pseudo-analog solutions in a fast Rayleigh fading channel. Trace-driven emulations are also carried out to demonstrate the advantage of the proposed solution over the state-of-the-art digital and pseudo-analog solutions under a real dramatically varying wireless environment.