Engineering wireless broadband access to IPTV

•We demonstrate effective codec configuration for wireless IPTV video streaming.•We demonstrate multiple protection measures for a wireless IPTV service.•We report performance over WiMAX access links with bursty error conditions.•We report broadband wireless IPTV prospects.

IPTV is now extending to wireless broadband access. If broadband video streaming is to achieve competitive quality the video stream itself must be carefully engineered to cope with challenging wireless channel conditions. This paper presents a scheme for doing this for H.264/AVC codec streaming across a WiMAX link. Packetization is an effective tool to govern error rates and, in the paper, source-coded data-partitioning serves to allocate smaller packets to more important data. A packetization strategy is insufficient in itself, as temporal error propagation should also be addressed by insertion of intra-coded data. It may be necessary to include redundant packets when channel conditions worsen. The whole should be protected by application-layer rateless coding. Therefore, the contribution of the paper is a complete scheme comprised of various protection measures aimed at robust IPTV streaming. Due to computational overheads, the scheme is aimed at the new generation of smartphones with GHz CPUs.