Cross‐layer source‐channel control for future wireless multimedia services: energy, latency, and quality investigation

Abstract

Efficient use of available energy resources for real-time multimedia communication with a quality guarantee is one of the main challenges for future mobile computing systems. To meet the high quality-of-experience (QoE) demand of multimedia services, we propose a novel quality-driven joint source-channel coding (JSCC) scheme with an unequal error protection (UEP) technique that allocates bits by optimising source intra refreshing rates and channel correction coding rates. The key contribution of this work is that the frame importance diversity at the application layer is jointly considered with the error correction techniques and resource constraints at lower layers. For any given bit budget, the JSCC model is capable of allocating adaptive bits between source coding and channel coding among media streams. The source-aware UEP scheme is capable of dynamically allocating the error correction bits among frames, achieving the maximum overall QoE. Simulation results demonstrated that significant improvement in multimedia quality and remarkable energy/time conservation can be achieved by deploying the proposed group-based JSCC strategy, although the complexity is limited.