A method to improve the robustness of MPEG video applications over wireless networks

Abstract

It is important that applications deployed in wireless networks be robust enough to accommodate different kinds of data losses due to link errors, connection re-routing, and network congestion. A scheme to improve the robustness of MPEG based video applications is proposed. Under this scheme, the packet size at the sender is optimized to the MPEG system layer unit size to enable fast recovery of the time stamps. The receiver buffers the data packets for re-playing during packet losses, preserves useful time stamps for synchronisation, and re-synchronises the decoder when packet loss occurs. This involves no feedback and results in faster recovery of critical timing information for video decoding. The proposed method has been implemented on a video application based on MPEG-I over an ATM network. The experiments show that the proposed technique is very effective when there is deterministic/random packet losses with burst size less than 21. The method is equally applicable to video applications based on MPEG-II program stream and, to wireless Internet.