MPEG-4 Video Transmission over Wireless Networks: A Link Level Performance Study

With the scalability and flexibility of the MPEG-4 and the emergence of the broadband wireless network, wireless multimedia services are foreseen to become deployed in the near future. Transporting MPEG-4 video over the broadband wireless network is expected to be an important component of many emerging multimedia applications. One of the critical issues for multimedia applications is to ensure that the quality-of-service (QoS) requirement to be maintained at an acceptable level. This is further challenged in that such a service guarantee must be achieved under unreliable and time-varying wireless channels. In this paper we study the link level performance of MPEG-4 video transmission over the uplink of an unreliable wireless channel. We introduce the discrete time batch Markovian arrival process (DBMAP) with two types of arrivals to model the MPEG-4 video source, which takes into account the inherent nature of the adaptiveness of the video traffic. We prove that in a hidden Markov modeled (HMM) wireless channel with probabilistic transmission, the service time for an arbitrary radio link control (RLC) burst follows phase type (PH-type) distribution. We show that the link level performance of a wireless video transmission system can be modeled by a DBMAP/PH/1 priority queue, and present computation algorithm and numerical results for the queueing model. Extensive simulations are carried out on the queueing behavior of the video transmission buffer, as well as on the packet level error behavior of the video data. The results demonstrate that video quality can be substantially improved by preserving the high priority video data during the transmission.