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6, NOVEMBER 2005
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AbstractWireless channels are characterized by high timevarying bit-error rates (BERs). To cope with this problem, several
adaptive forward-error-correction (AFEC) schemes have been
proposed in the literature. They work locally at the wireless link,
adding a variable amount of redundancy to the transmitted data in
order to maintain the packet error rate below an acceptable level.
However, when such schemes are utilized, the bandwidth offered to
the applications changes when channel conditions change. In this
paper, the effects of these bandwidth variations are investigated
in the case of real-time Motion Picture Experts Group (MPEG)
video transmission. The MPEG encoder is controlled in order to
adapt its emission rate to the current bandwidth offered by the
wireless link. To this end, the encoding quality is diminished by
the source rate controller when the transmission rate has to be
decreased due to an increase in the channel BER, whereas it is
improved when the transmission rate can be increased due to a
decrease in the channel BER. A Markov-based model, denoted as
SBBP/SBBP/1/K, has been introduced to model the scenario being
considered. The analytical framework allows evaluation of the
performance of the system and can be used to optimize the design
of a video transmission system for wireless channels, providing the
instruments to derive the tradeoff between information corruption
in the wireless channel and MPEG video encoding quality.
Index TermsForward error correction (FEC), Motion Picture
Experts Group (MPEG), quality of service (QoS), switched batch
Bernoulli process (SBBP), wireless channels.
I. I NTRODUCTION
higher the BER, the higher the amount of redundancy introduced. However, in wireless channels, the BER is characterized
by high time variability: There are periods when channel
conditions are good, that is, the BER is low, and periods when
channel conditions are bad, that is, the BER is high. In order to
maintain a high level of resource efficiency while guaranteeing
the information accuracy required by applications, several
adaptive FEC (AFEC) schemes have been introduced in the
recent past [1], [2], [6], [7]. According to these schemes, the
amount of redundancy at any time depends on the channel
conditions being low if channel conditions are good, and high
if channel conditions are bad. One consequence is that AFEC
schemes cause variations in the bandwidth offered to user
applications, which therefore have to adapt their output rate
accordingly.
This paper focuses on video applications that are destined
to become very common in wireless-communication scenarios.
More specifically, the target of the paper is the definition of
an analytical framework for the design of a real-time Motion
Picture Experts Group (MPEG) video transmission system over
a wireless link that applies AFEC to keep the packet corruption probability acceptable, i.e., below a given threshold. The
MPEG encoder uses a rate controller that adapts the output
rate by appropriately setting the quantizer scale parameter
(QSP) [8], [12], [29] to follow the bandwidth variations, while
maximizing encoding quality and stability. In order to achieve
this target, the rate controller monitors the activity of the frame
that is being encoded, its encoding mode, and the number of
bytes used to encode the previous frames. Then, it chooses the
appropriate QSP in such a way that the transmission buffer at
the sender site never saturates, even during periods with low
available bandwidth. The whole system can be modeled by an
emission process that feeds the transmission buffer. The server
of this buffer behaves according to the channel conditions
estimated by the adaptive error controller: The serving rate
is higher when channel conditions are good and lower when
channel conditions are bad.
Switched batch Bernoulli processes (SBBPs) are used to
model both the MPEG source [4], [15], [17], and the server
process of the transmission buffer that coincides with the timevarying bandwidth available in the wireless channel [20], [24]
[28]. Accordingly, an SBBP/SBBP/1/K model is introduced to
describe the whole system.
The analytical framework proposed in the paper is used to
evaluate the performance in terms of the distortion introduced
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GALLUCCIO et al.: TRANSMISSION OF ADAPTIVE MPEG VIDEO OVER TIME-VARYING WIRELESS CHANNELS
frame, and 31 being the value giving the worst encoding quality,
but requiring the minimum number of bits.
The QSP can be dynamically changed according to the
feedback law implemented by the rate controller in order to
achieve a given target. The MPEG encoder emits one frame
every seconds, and its output is packetized in the packetizer according to the UDP/IP protocol suite: the packetizer
fragments the information flow into blocks of UP bytes1 ; these
blocks constitute the payloads for the UDP, which adds a header
of 8 bytes; each UDP packet is then put in the payload field of
an IP packet.
The IP packets are then sent to a transmission buffer whose
service rate is time varying and depends on the channel condition estimated by the adaptive error controller, as will be
explained below. The main target of the rate controller is to
avoid buffer saturation, which causes losses and long delays,
while maximizing the encoding quality and stability. To this
end, it chooses the QSP parameter according to a feedback
law monitoring the activity of the frame being encoded, its
encoding mode (I, P, or B), and the current number of packets
in the transmission buffer. The model introduced in the paper
is so general that it can be applied whatever the feedback law.
The feedback law used in the paper was introduced in [4] and
[17] and, for the sake of completeness, will be reported in
Section V-A. It has been defined in such a way that a controlled
number of packets are present in the transmission buffer at the
end of each GoP, while pursuing a constant distortion level
within the GoP. Packets leaving the transmission buffer enter
the adaptive error controller. Its main target is to use FEC to
partially solve the problem of wireless-link unreliability. The
FEC block creator divides packets into sets of k blocks. These
blocks are given as input to the AFEC encoder and encoded
in sets of m blocks, with m k. If any set of k or more
blocks belonging to the same packet is received correctly, then
the original packet can be reconstructed properly. Obviously,
the larger the value of m, the higher the probability that the
information can be reconstructed at the receiver station, but the
lower the wireless-link bandwidth available at the video source.
The value of m is chosen by the FEC controller in such a
way that the PEP, i.e., the probability that a packet cannot be
reconstructed at the receiver station, is no higher than a target
(C)
value PPEP . Given that wireless channel conditions change
dynamically, AFEC encoding is applied, as proposed in [1],
[2], [6], and [7]. This encoding technique requires knowledge
of the current BER on the link. This estimation is performed
by the wireless channel estimator. The estimated BER value
is given as input to the FEC controller, which evaluates m so
that the requirement on the PEP is satisfied. The value of m
therefore changes in time and, as a consequence, the available
link capacity c(t) also changes in time as
c(t) =
k
c
m(t)
(1)
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(Y )
B s ,r
[Y ]
(2)
(3)
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and set (Q(Y ) , B (Yq ) ), for each q [1, 31], defines the SBBP
emission process modeling the output flow of the noncontrolled
MPEG encoder, when it uses a constant QSP value q.
C. Service SBBP Model
The target of this section is to derive the SBBP model of
(n), which represents the service process of the
the process N
transmission buffer when AFEC is employed. As said so far,
it closely depends on the amount of redundancy the AFEC
(C)
encoder introduces to achieve the target maximum PEP PPEP
due to the wireless channel.
As usual, (e.g., [14], [24], and [26]), we assume that the
channel behavior can be described by means of an M -states
Markov process. Accordingly, channel statistical behavior can
be described by an M M transition probability matrix Q(C)
and by BERi , the BERs for each state of the process i [1, M ].
Thus, the service SBBP model is represented by the following parameters:
1) the maximum number of packets that can be transmitted
)
(N
in a time slot rMAX ;
in [26]. The state space (N ) coincides with the channel state
(C)
PPEP,i PPEP .
(4)
m
l=mk+1
m
(1 PBEP,i )ml (PBEP,i )l (5)
l
where PBEP,i represents the probability that a block is corrupted when the channel is in state i, and can be evaluated as
follows:
PBEP,i = 1 (1 BERi )R .
(6)
(7)
GALLUCCIO et al.: TRANSMISSION OF ADAPTIVE MPEG VIDEO OVER TIME-VARYING WIRELESS CHANNELS
)
(N
[i,d]
pDi ,
pDi +1 ,
0,
)
(N
rMAX ]
if d = Di
if d = Di + 1
otherwise
(8)
)
(N
rMAX
where
is the maximum number of packets that can be
transmitted in one slot, i.e.,
)
(N
(9)
(10)
D. Video-Transmission-System Model
The adaptive-rate source pursues a given target by implementing a feedback law in the rate controller, which calculates
the value q of the QSP to be used by the MPEG encoder for
each frame. The target of this section is to model the video
transmission system as a whole, indicated here as . To this
aim, we use a discrete-time queueing system model.
Let K represent the maximum number of packets that can
be contained in the queue of the transmission buffer and its
server. The server capacity of this queueing system, that is, the
number of packets that can leave the queue at each time slot,
is a stochastic process that has been modeled with the channel
(n).
SBBP process N
The input of the queue system is the emission process of
the adaptive-rate source, indicated here as Y (n). Therefore, at
slot n, the transmission-buffer queue size is incremented by
(n). Both the input and the output
Y (n), and decremented by N
processes can be modeled by means of two SBBP processes,
as discussed above, where the slot duration is the frame
duration .
To model the queueing system, we assume a late-arrivalsystem-with-immediate-access time diagram [3], [11]: Packets
arrive in batches, and can enter the service facility if it is
free, with the possibility of them being ejected almost instantaneously. Note that in this model, a packet service time is
counted as the number of slot boundaries from the point of entry
to the service facility up to the packet departure time. Therefore,
even though we allow the arriving packet to be ejected almost
instantaneously, its service time is counted as 1, not 0.
A complete description of at the nth slot requires a
three-dimensional Markov process, whose state is defined as
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M (N ) (d)
s ,s
N
(n + 1) = d,
N
(N )
S (n) = sN
Prob
S (N ) (n + 1) = sN
= Q(N ) B (N )
s ,s
N
)
(N
0, rMAX
s ,d
N
.
(11)
trix Ms (r) can be obtained from the above parameter set
Q
[(i ,j ),(i ,j )]
a (Act)
B (Yq ) (r)
[(i ,j ),r]
[(i ,j ),(i ,j )]
(12)
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element is
Q()
(Q)
S (n + 1) = sQ ,
)
(N
Prob S (n + 1) = sN ,
(Y )
S (n + 1) = sY ,
)
(N
(Q)
S (n) = sQ ,
(N )
S (n) = sN ,
S (Y ) (n) = s ,
Y
dMAX rMAX
d=0
r=0
(Y )
Ms (r)
Q
s ,s
s
,
s
,
.
.
.
,
r,
d
Q
Q
s ,s
Y
(14)
[s
] (p) =
1, if F (j ) sQ , a , j = p .
0, otherwise
(19)
()
K
,a ,j
Once the matrix Q() is known, we can calculate the steadystate probability array of the system as the solution of the
following linear system
() Q() = ()
(16)
() 1 = 1
. (17)
)
(Y
M (N ) (d)
=
()
[(sQ ,sN ,sY )]
K
) i (G) j J s =0
) i (G) a (Act)
sQ =0 s (N
s (N
Q
Q
()
()
sQ ,s ,(i ,j )
N
GALLUCCIO et al.: TRANSMISSION OF ADAPTIVE MPEG VIDEO OVER TIME-VARYING WIRELESS CHANNELS
()
where :
(PSNR)
= Prob {PSNR(n) l }
(20)
() Ql
()
() Ql 1T
(25)
PSNR(n + 1) l , . . . , PSNR(n + m 1) l , PSNR(n 1) l
PSNR(n) l
PSNR(n + m) l
(24)
Q()
l
A. System Characterization
pl
()
(,=l ) Ql 1T
V. C ASE S TUDY
(PSNR)
fl (m) = Prob
(,l ) Ql
()
(,=l ) =
in
and (21), shown at the bottom of the page. The term [l]
(20) can be calculated from the pdf fPSNR (p) obtained in (18)
as follows:
(PSNR)
=
fPSNR (p).
(22)
[l]
(1,l ) =
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a (Act)
=
0,
()
Q
sQ ,s ,(i ,j )
N
s
,s ,(i ,j )
Q N
(21)
(a ,j )
if sQ l
otherwise
(23)
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TABLE I
Q(C) PARAMETERS IN THE PEDESTRIAN CASE (fm = 10 Hz) AND DRIVER CASE (fm = 100 Hz)
TABLE II
REDUNDANCY BLOCKS AND NET LINK CAPACITY OFFERED TO THE APPLICATION FOR DIFFERENT CHANNEL STATES AND TARGET ERROR
(C)
PROBABILITIES PPEP IN THE DRIVER CASE, WHEN THE GROSS LINK CAPACITY IS c = 2 Mb/s
GALLUCCIO et al.: TRANSMISSION OF ADAPTIVE MPEG VIDEO OVER TIME-VARYING WIRELESS CHANNELS
Fig. 2.
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Rate-distortion curves for I, P, and B frames. Rate curves for (a) frame I, (b) frame B, and (c) frame P. (d) Distortion curves.
B. Numerical Results
Fig. 3 shows the pdfs of the transmission-buffer queue
size for the two values of the Doppler frequency fm and for
a given value of the target error probability among those being
considered. The values shown have been calculated as follows:
Prob S (Q) (n) = sQ =
sN
)
(N
sY
(Y )
()
(s ,s ,s ) .
[ Q N Y ]
(27)
We can observe that the curves are basically Gamma distributions and are very similar to each other independently of
(C)
the PPEP value. This is the evidence that the feedback law
works properly. This is further demonstrated in Fig. 4 where
we show the average queue size as well as the mean delay in
the transmission buffer. The value of the average queue size
(C)
does not change significantly when the PPEP changes and is
higher in the driver case. This can be explained by the fact that
in the driver case, the wireless medium quality is lower and
therefore, the transmission-buffer service rate is lower. Similar
discussions can be carried out concerning Fig. 5, where the
performance in terms of loss probability in the transmission
buffer is shown and calculated as in [4].
q)
k [j + 1, . . . , GI ]
F (k) (qk ) = F (j) (
q = (sQ , a, j) = min
I
q[1,31]
q) + G
sQ + Ra,j (
k=j Ra,j (qk ) (GI j + 1) N (n) K
(26)
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Fig. 3. Transmission-buffer size pdf for PPEP = 102 (a) in the pedestrian case and (b) in the driver case.
(C)
(C)
Fig. 4. Average transmission-buffer size and mean delay versus the target error probability PPEP .
GALLUCCIO et al.: TRANSMISSION OF ADAPTIVE MPEG VIDEO OVER TIME-VARYING WIRELESS CHANNELS
Fig. 5.
(C)
Packet loss probability in the transmission buffer versus the target error probability PPEP .
Fig. 6.
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(C)
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Laura Galluccio received the Laurea degree in electrical engineering and the Ph.D. degree in electrical,
computer and telecommunications engineering, both
from the University of Catania, Catania, Italy, in
2001 and 2005, respectively.
Since 2002, she has been with the Italian National
Consortium of Telecommunications (CNIT), where
she is working as a Research Fellow within the Virtual Immersive Communications (VICOM) Project.
From May to July 2005, she was a Visiting Scholar
at the COMET Group, Columbia University, New
York, NY. Her research interests include ad hoc and sensor networks, protocols
and algorithms for wireless networks, and network performance analysis.
Dr. Galluccio served and will serve in the Program Committee of the
4th Academic Network for Wireless Internet Research in Europe (ANWIRE)
International Workshop on Wireless Internet and Reconfigurability, the 20th
International Symposium on Computer and Information Sciences (ISCIS 05),
and Networking 2006.
Giovanni Schembra received the degree in electrical engineering from the University of Catania,
Catania, Italy, in 1991. Working in the telecommunications area, he received the Masters degree
from CEFRIEL, Milan, Italy, in 1992, with his thesis
focusing on the analytical performance evaluation in
an ATM network. He received the Ph.D. degree in
electronics, computer science, and telecommunications engineering with a dissertation on multimedia
traffic modeling in a broadband network.
He is currently an Assistant Professor in Telecommunications at the University of Catania.