Robust H.264 video coding and transmission over bursty packet-loss wireless networks

Packet video transmission over wireless networks is expected to experience packet loss due to either temporary link outages or fading-induced bit errors. Such packet losses often occur in bursts which may cause substantial degradation to the transmitted video quality. In this paper, we investigate the combined use of passive error concealment together with FEC coding and periodic intra-updating to handle the expected bursty packet losses for packet video coding and transmission over 3G-enabled wireless IP networks. We show that, depending on the available bit rate, FEC coding combined with proper selection of the intra-updating rate and error concealment can significantly improve the end-to-end video transmission performance over packet loss networks. The results also show that under extreme bit-rate limited conditions, the use of intra-updating with error concealment alone can provide relatively robust video transport in the presence of bursty packet losses.