Progressive video transmission over a wired-to-wireless network

Advances in mobile computing, combined with the increasing demand for multimedia services on mobile terminals have generated much interest in error-resilient video transmission over wireless networks. Much of the work on video transmission has focused on either dealing with packet losses due to congestion found in IP wireline networks or bit errors and packet losses due to the fading channel environment of a wireless network. Many of the applications for multimedia services will involve video transmission over a wired-to-wireless link and an important research topic is error-resilient video which can adapt to the different conditions found in a wired and wireless environment. The current solutions in transmission of multimedia across different networks include some type of transcoder where the source is partially or fully decoded and re-encoded to suit the network conditions. Here we introduce a flexible progressive source/channel coding framework for video which can adapt to the different conditions imposed by wired and wireless channels at the bitstream level, avoiding the often computationally complex step of transcoding between networks that could deteriorate decoded video quality. The framework also allows for graceful degradation of video quality when the network conditions are poor due to congestion or deep fades.