Parallel TCP and scalable video coding for jitter free video transmission over MIMO wireless networks

There is a significant rise in demand for video transmission over 3G and 4G wireless networks due to the rising popularity of video streaming websites such as YouTube. The market for video streaming over wireless networks is expected to increase sharply in the future. Both of the two basic transport layer protocols without modifications are not suited for video transmission over wireless networks. UDP (user datagram protocol) suffers from inherent unreliability, resulting in corrupted video due to frequent corruption of packets. Inherent features of wireless networks such as noise, interference, etc. result in packet corruption. On the other hand, the performance of TCP (transmission control protocol) is worse than UDP (Thangaraj et al. in Telecommun Syst 45(4):303-312, 2010) because of frequently corrupted packets. Due to its reliable data transfer feature, TCP continuously retransmits the corrupted packet until successful reception at the receiver. This leads to jitter in video playback and poor end user quality of experience. Multiple TCP connections with appropriate optimization can lead to an increased efficiency of bandwidth utilization in comparison to single TCP based video transmission over wireless networks. It has been shown that multiple TCP connections enhance the video transmission and playback experience by providing reliable communication. The parallel TCP scheme proposed in this paper enhances the quality of video transmission and playback experience over MIMO wireless networks employing scalable hierarchical wavelet decomposition based video encoding with multiple TCP connections.