Performance evaluation of 3D-TV transmission over WiMAX broadband access networks

3-Dimensional Television (3D-TV) is an emerging area of consumer entertainment, which gives its viewers an added dimension of experience. At the moment 3DTV is going through a series of standardization activities, especially to finalize a representation technique. Extra information that needs to be transmitted in 3D-TV systems has brought about new problems that need to be solved. Models have been introduced to explain the distortion characteristics in traditional 2D video, when they are transmitted over existing wireless networks. However, the effect of transmission errors caused by bandwidth limited wireless channels on 3D video is not yet fully known. In this paper we present a performance evaluation of 3D-TV transmission over an error prone WiMAX broadband wireless access network. Experiments are performed on two popular types of representation methods of 3D video, namely color plus depth and left and right representation. Based on these experiments, important conclusions regarding 3D-TV transmission over WiMAX networks are presented.