Low bit-rate video transmission over fading channels for wireless microcellular systems

We consider the transmission of QCIF resolution (176/spl times/144 pixels) video signals over wireless channels at transmission rates of 64 kb/s and below. The bursty nature of the errors on the wireless channel requires careful control of transmission performance without unduly increasing the overhead for error protection. A dual-rate source coder is presented that adaptively selects a coding rate according to the current channel conditions. An automatic repeat request (ARQ) error control technique is employed to retransmit erroneous data-frames. The source coding rate is selected based on the occupancy level of the ARQ transmission buffer. Error detection followed by retransmission results in less overhead than forward error correction for the same quality. Simulation results are provided for the statistics of the frame-error bursts of the proposed system over code division multiple access (CDMA) channels with average bit error rates of 10/sup -3/ to 10/sup -4/.