<title>Real-time software-based end-to-end wireless visual communications simulation platform</title>

Abstract

For visual communication services to be truly ubiquitous, transmission of video signals over the wireless medium should be feasible with acceptable quality. Wireless transmission characteristics are dominated by channel effects like multipath propagation and Doppler frequency which result in severe error bursts and time-varying signal strengths. Such channel effects pose serious challenges to real-time visual communications systems. In this paper, we describe a software based wireless visual communications simulation platform which can be used to evaluate wireless video performance in real-time. The platform consists of two personal computers serving as hosts. Major components of each PC host include a real-time programmable video codec, a wireless channel simulator, and a network interface for data transport between the two hosts. These three components are interfaced in real-time to show the interaction of various wireless channels and video coding algorithms. The programmable features in the above components give us the flexibility to study various wireless channel effects without physically carrying out these experiments. Physically building such systems can be very time-consuming, costly, and the experiments are only limited in scope.