Effective Video Transport over WiMAX with Data Partitioning and Rateless Coding

Video streaming is anticipated to be a key application of broadband wireless access networks such as WiMAX. This paper proposes a combination of data-partitioning of compressed video information and rateless channel coding to ensure effective video transport. A counter-intuitive result is that comparatively improved objective video quality occurs even though privileged application-layer forward error correction is not given to high priority data. Instead a flat channel coding is used across the data partitions. The scheme results in a lower number of dropped packets at the transmitter buffer and/or a reduced number of packets corrupted by channel noise compared to simple slicing or no frame slicing at all. Larger-sized IEEE 802.16 (WiMAX) Time Division Duplex frames are found to reduce the number of packets dropped through traffic congestion.