Stochastic rate-control of video coders for wireless channels

We introduce a new approach to deal with the transmission of real-time video over wireless channels, based on a priori stochastic models for both source and channel. This new problem formulation captures in a natural way the stochastic nature of the channel as well as the uncertainty regarding the properties of the video sequence. Our formulation leads to an optimal control problem that can be solved off-line, employing standard stochastic dynamic programming techniques. The outcome of this optimization is an off-line control policy that is optimal in the sense of minimizing the average coding distortion. The on-line computational cost of the new approach is thus very low: all that is required during run-time is to identify the state of the system (source and channel). Unlike other optimization-based rate control techniques, which require a search for the optimal operating point, the operating points here for each allowable state of the system have been precalculated. We consider wireless packet-based transmission with Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) error control. While a standard model has been adopted to characterize the channel behavior, a new model based on the concept of coding complexity has been devised in order to characterize the video source. Simulation results based on this new approach are provided and compared to other proposed rate-control strategies. They show how the use of model-based optimal policies has negligible on-line computational cost while providing a transmission quality comparable to that achieved with more costly deterministic dynamic programming techniques, and significantly better than for simpler algorithms that do not explicitly take into account the channel state.