Wireless video transport using conditional retransmission and low-delay interleaving

We consider the scenario of using Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) retransmission for two-way low-bit-rate video communications over wireless Rayleigh fading channels. Low-delay constraint may require that a corrupted retransmitted packet not be retransmitted again, and thus there will be packet errors at the decoder which results in video quality degradation. We propose a scheme to improve the video quality. First, we propose a low-delay interleaving scheme that uses the video encoder buffer as a part of interleaving memory. Second, we propose a conditional retransmission strategy that reduces the number of retransmissions. Simulation results show that our proposed scheme can effectively reduce the number of packet errors and improve the channel utilization. As a result, we reduce the number of skipped frames and obtain a peak signal-to-noise ratio improvement up to about 4 dB compared to H.263 TMN-8.