Cross-layer packetization and retransmission strategies for delay-sensitive wireless multimedia transmission

Abstract

Existing wireless networks provide dynamically varying resources with only limited support for the quality of service required by the bandwidth-intense, loss-tolerant, and delay-sensitive multimedia applications. This variability of resources does not significantly impact delay insensitive data transmission (e.g., file transfers), but has considerable consequences for multimedia applications. Recently, the research focus has been to adapt existing algorithms and protocols at the lower layers of the protocol stack to better support multimedia transmission applications, and conversely, to modify application layer solutions to cope with the varying wireless networks resources. In this paper, we show that significant improvements in wireless multimedia performance can be obtained by deploying a joint application-layer adaptive packetization and prioritized scheduling and MAC-layer retransmission strategy. We deploy a state-of-the-art wavelet coder for the compression of the video data that enables on-the-fly adaptation to changing channel conditions and inherent prioritization of the video bitstream. We pose the cross-layer problem as a distortion minimization given delay constraints and derive analytical solutions by modifying existing joint source-channel coding theory aimed at fulfilling rate, rather than delay, constraints. We also propose real-time algorithms that explicitly consider the available information about previously transmitted packets. The obtained results show significant improvements in terms of video quality as opposed to ad-hoc optimizations currently deployed, while the complexity associated with performing this optimization in real time, i.e., at transmission time, is limited. © 2006 IEEE.