An improved UDP protocol for video transmission over Internet-to-wireless networks

Packet video will become a significant portion of emerging and future wireless/Internet traffic. However, network congestion and wireless channel error yields tremendous packet loss and degraded video quality. In this paper, we propose a new complete user datagram protocol (CUDP), which utilizes channel error information obtained from the physical and link layers to assist error recovery at the packet level. We propose several maximal distance separable (MDS) code-based packet level error control coding schemes and derive analytical formulas to estimate the equivalent video frame loss for different versions of user datagram protocol (UDP). We validate the proposed packet coding and CUDP protocol using MPEG-coded video under various Internet packet loss and wireless channel profiles. Theoretic and simulation results show that the video quality can be substantially improved by utilizing the frame error information at UDP and application layer.