Adaptive UWB AV PHY IEEE 802.15.3c for compressed SPIHT image transmission

During the last decade, the need for visual content applications over mobile wireless environments have been progressively widespread. Motivated by the OSI layered approach, most visual applications make separation between content compression, and data transmission. Then, the received multimedia quality is degraded because of the sensitivity of the compressed stream to the transmission errors. In this paper, we propose a solution where the physical layer is scaled according to the compressed stream importance. The target application, which is visual multimedia sensor networks, motivated the use of the high-rate Ultra Wide Band (UWB) Audio Visual (AV) PHY IEEE 802.15.3c standard. We consider an embedded image compression scheme where bits are hierarchically organized, and we make different modulation, error-protection and sub-carrier assignments to them to improve the reconstructed image quality while keeping the same data-rate performance. We investigate the performance of the adaptive approach in terms of Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) against Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) for UWB-modeled channels. Moreover, we emphasize the gains induced by the adaptive UWB on the reconstructed image quality. It is demonstrated that dynamically assigning the symbols to sub-carriers allows a O.SdB PSNR quality improvement while keeping the same rate is the same. Allocating different channel codes and different modulation orders improves the reconstructed PSNR by 3.SdB when Eb/N0 = SdB.