Adaptive source rate control for wireless video conferencing

Hybrid ARQ schemes can yield much better throughput and reliability than static FEC schemes for the transmission of data over time-varying wireless channels. However these schemes result in higher delay. They adapt to the varying channel conditions by retransmitting erroneous packets, this results in variable effective data rates for current PCS networks because the channel bandwidth is constant. Hybrid ARQ schemes are currently being proposed as the error control schemes for real-time video transmission. The standardization process is on-going in ITU, MPEG-4 and wireless ATM forum. The important issue is how to ensure low delay while taking advantage of the high throughput and reliability that these schemes provide for. In this paper we propose an adaptive source rate control (ASRC) protocol which can work together with the hybrid ARQ error control schemes to achieve efficient transmission of real-time video with low delay and high reliability. The ASRC scheme adjusts the source rate based on the channel conditions, the transport buffer occupancy and the delay constraints. It optimizes the video quality by dynamically changing both the number of the forced update (intracoded) macroblocks and the quantization scale used in a frame. The number of the forced update macroblocks used in a frame is first adjusted according to the allocated source rate. This reduces the fluctuation of the quantization scale with the change in the channel conditions during encoding so that the uniformity of the video quality is improved. The simulation results show that the proposed ASRC protocol performs very well for both slow fading and fast fading channels.