Solution for Hybrid Bandwidth Variation in Wireless Video Environments

With the development of broadband wireless networks, high efficiency of wireless video transmission has been received increasingly greater attentions than before. One should settle the problems of high-compression efficiency and that of adaptation to the random variation of transmission bandwidth, as well as a network friendly design, in wireless environments. SP (Synchronization-Predictive) frame, which enables high efficiency of switching between two or more bitstreams with different qualities, is supported by H.264/AVC extended profile suitable for mobile services. On the other hand, FGS (fine-granular-scalability), which can always adapt to the network bandwidth varying but with some sacrifice of coding efficiency, is supported by MPEG-4. This paper proposes a solution for combination these two tools with each other so as to accommodate high bandwidth variations of wireless networks and low bandwidth variations flexibly for transmitted streams. Moreover, it also improves the efficiency of video streaming. Experimental results show that our proposed system outperforms FGS by 0.76 dB and the H.264/AVC-based video stream switching approach by 0.51 dB on average under 3GPP/3GPP2 wireless common test conditions