Trade-Off Between Compression and FEC in Image Transmission Over Wifibroadcast

Wireless transmission of images in real time over large distances is a challenge for applications such as agricultural UAV-based remote sensing. The Wifibroadcast project uses standard WiFi hardware to provide a purely unidirectional transmission link for such situations. This paper examines the trade-off between image compression and FEC for image transmission via Wifibroadcast. The goal is to achieve highest robustness against transmission errors with regards to visual quality. For this, we conducted two experiments: First, we implemented a complete simulation of the transmission process to assess different degrees of packet and byte corruption. Afterward, we incorporated real network traces into the simulation in order to model realistic corruption patterns. The results show that for uniformly distributed byte corruption patterns, compression in combination with redundancy does not yield benefits to visual quality. However, if packet loss is the dominating corruption source, FEC is able to make image transmission more robust.