Transmission of compressed video over radio links

A system for transmitting a compressed video signal over a radio link has been developed. The scheme involves altering the output bitstream of an H.261 videocodec to allow data transmission over a Digital European Cordless Telecommunications (DECT) demonstrator system. The system was used to demonstrate acceptable picture quality at bit rates between 32 kbit/s and 284 kbit/s. The high error rate possible for a radio link requires that techniques for improving the error resilience of the coding scheme be investigated. The resilience may be improved by forward error correction, interleaving of the data stream and by repeating blocks which have been corrupted by transmission. The viability of the system has been proven by hardware trials but further study is required before the system is usable on a real network.