Scalable video transport over wireless IP networks

There has been great interest in transporting real-time video over wireless IP networks from both industry and academia. Real-time video applications have quality-of-service (QoS) requirements. However, the fluctuations of wireless channel conditions pose many challenges to providing QoS for video transmission over wireless IP networks. It has been shown that scalable video coding and adaptive services are viable solutions under a time-varying wireless environment. We propose an adaptive framework to support quality video communication over wireless IP networks. The adaptive framework includes: (1) scalable video representations, (2) network-aware video applications, and (3) adaptive services. Under this framework, as wireless channel conditions change, the mobile terminal and network elements can scale the video streams and transport the scaled video streams to receivers with acceptable perceptual quality. The key advantages of the adaptive framework are: (1) perceptual quality is degraded gracefully under severe channel conditions; (2) network resources are efficiently utilized; and (3) the resources are shared in a fair manner.