H.264/AVC Video Transmission over UWB AV PHY IEEE 802.15.3c using UEP and Adaptive Modulation Techniques

Abstract

In recent years, multimedia applications especially video applications has become more and more important. The video transmission via Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs) needs high rate which motivated the use of Ultra Wide Band (UWB) Audio Visual (AV) PHY IEEE 802.15.3c. This paper proposes a robust video transmission of H.264/AVC baseline coding over UWB AV PHY IEEE 802.15.3c using Unequal Error Protection (UEP), Hierarchical Modulation and Adaptive modulation, which takes into consideration the importance of the different frames in the Group Of Pictures (GOP) and the sensitivity of the encoded bit stream to the transmission errors caused by the UWB wireless channel to improve the video quality reconstruction. Simulation results show that the proposed UEP scheme outperforms the Equal Error Protection (EEP) scheme by up to 15dB in terms of Average Peak Signal-to-noise Ratio (Average PSNR). It is also demonstrated that applying UEP with Hierarchical Modulation improves the Average PSNR by 15 dB and allocating different modulation orders allows an improvement of 20 dB on the Average PSNR reconstructed video quality.