Reliable video transmission techniques for wireless MPEG-4 streaming systems

Multimedia streaming over wireless network faces the problem of low-handwidth data transmission in an error prone environment. Furthermore, due to the frame dependency exploited by the video coding schemes, packet loss could degrade the perceptual quality of the media streams. In this paper, we design and implement a group-of-pictures (GOP) based video packet interleaving technique to reduce the impact of bursty packet losses. At the server side of our system, the packets of B or P frames are interleaved into the packets of a single I frame. At the client side, the deinterleaving method is developed based on the RTP [1] timestamp of RTP header. We also apply the technique to the MPEG-4 [2] video codec in the streaming system and integrate its error resilient tools -- video packet, data partition, and RVLC, to increase the performance of GOP based video packet interleaving technique. From the experiment results, we show that our technique improves the perceptual quality better than the classic scheme does.