Near-Instantaneously Adaptive Multi-Set Space-Time Shift Keying for UAV-Aided Video Surveillance

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are more suitable for surveillance systems than their traditional stationary counterparts. To meet the associated demanding video compression requirements, the H.265/High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) codec is invoked. Its scalable video coding extension is capable of supporting diverse video resolutions by encoding the video clips captured into multiple layers, namely the Base Layer (BL) and several Enhancement Layers (EL). In this treatise, we propose a multi-functional Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) transceiver relying on Multi-Set Space-Time Shift Keying (MS-STSK) for UAV-aided near-instantaneously adaptive layered video streaming, which is capable of promptly varying the throughput as a function of both the estimated channel quality as well as of the UAV mobility, while maintaining near-flawless video quality. Additionally, we invoke EXtrinsic Information Transfer (EXIT) charts for characterizing our Unequal Error Protection (UEP) based video transceiver with the aid of near-capacity channel coding. Some of the perceptually less important ELs may have to be dropped during instances of low channel quality to retain the robustness of the transmitted video stream when a low-throughput MIMO configuration is activated. The simulation results show that our proposed UEP assisted adaptive system is capable of attaining the best Y-Peak SNR (PSNR) performance in comparison to both its non-adaptive and Equal Error Protection (EEP) counterparts.