A solution to efficient power allocation for H.264/SVC video transmission over a realistic MIMO channel using precoder designs

In this paper we propose a novel scheme for real time SVC-based video transmission over MIMO channels in the context of joint Source Channel Coding (JSCC). This scheme compares the transmission of the H.264/SVC video over four precoder solutions, namely Max-SNR, WF, QoS and E-d(min). We exploit the high flexibility of the QoS precoder to minimize the total distortion of the received video. The proposed adaptive QoS precoder takes into account the scalability of the H.264/SVC standard jointly with the instantaneous MIMO channel statue. Finally, the proposed scheme is evaluated over both statistical and time varying realistic MIMO channels. This study provides the performance of these four precoder designs in term of BER, ML decoder complexity and the quality of the received video. We show that the precoder solutions providing the best BER performance are not usually the most appropriate for real time video transmission. However, the adaptive QoS precoder which uses three configurations, by considering both the importance of the video bitstream and the channel statue, provides the best Rate-Distortion performance regardless the channel conditions. We assess the accuracy of these four precoder solutions against channel estimation errors over time varying realistic MIMO channel. The results shows that the adaptive QoS precoder remains robust against channel estimation errors even at high mobility speed. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.