Models and analysis of streaming video transmission over wireless fading channels

In this paper, we first develop a simple but nevertheless accurate and fully analytical model for the sequence-level distortion–rate (D–R) performance of predictive video source encoding. This model focuses on the input–output behavior of the source encoder and requires very limited amount of empirical data to set up its working parameters, namely three pairs of rate and distortion. Then, we propose an accurate and fully analytical model for the distortion due to lost frames in wireless communication systems. The proposed model builds on long-term average properties of the video source. In our analysis, we combine the properties of the video sequence and those of the wireless transmission link. Finally, we provide an asymptotic analysis of the video transmission through a wireless channel. We compare the results to those obtained by using less sophisticated models, like a (D–R)-function that is built on a Gaussian memoryless source. It is shown that the obtained results are substantially different.