Wireless Video Communications Over Lossy Channels

Wireless video communications are a growing segment of communications in both commercial and defense domains. Due to its lossy nature, it requires a powerful error correction mechanism. In the commercial domain, ever more people watch videos on portable wireless devices, while in defense domains, surveillance assets grow rapidly to provide real-time motion imagery intelligence. In both domains, the transmission of high-quality video is of vital importance, and a variety of both source and channel codecs have been developed, separately for each domain, and application. In this paper, we outline an effort to explore the space of video codecs, channel codecs, channel models, and error concealment methods, in an attempt to find the best practices within this large search space. Among source codecs, we focus attention on the two most common video codecs in use: H.264/AVC, and H.265/HEVC. We perform simulations of an additive white gaussian noise channel model with stressfully low signal-to-noise ratios and use powerful Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) and Polar codes to correct errors. While some earlier studies had suggested that H.264 might in fact be more suitable for video communications in a lossy environment, our preliminary results appear to suggest that H.265 may actually be better, provided we use powerful error correction.