Content-Aware Resource Allocation for Scalable Video Transmission to Multiple Users Over a Wireless Network

Abstract

Wireless video transmission is prone to unpredictable degradations due to time-varying channel conditions. Such degradations are difficult to overcome using conventional video coding techniques. Scalable video coding offers a flexible bitstream that can be dynamically adapted to fit the prevailing channel conditions. Within a scalable video coding framework, we develop simple packet prioritization strategies, which, when combined with a reasonable error concealment scheme and a content-aware resource allocation technique, provide for robust video transmission over time-varying channels. The packet prioritization as well as the calculation of the content-aware scheduling metric can be performed offline and signaled to the wireless scheduler.