Quality-Driven Joint Rate and Power Adaptation for Scalable Video Transmissions Over MIMO Systems

We propose a joint rate and power adaptation scheme to maximize the decoding quality for scalable video coding (SVC)-based video transmissions over multi-input multi-output (MIMO) systems. The rate adaptation in our proposed scheme includes selection of the best modulation and coding schemes, set of spatial channels, number of SVC layers (source coding rates), and their corresponding application layer forward error correction (APP-FEC) coding rates. The power adaptation involves the proper allocation of the power to each antenna in the MIMO system. SVC-based video transmissions require unequal error protection (UEP) for different SVC layers due to the inter-layer dependency. In most of the previous works, the bit stream of each particular SVC layer is allocated to one spatial channel and the UEP is achieved by transmitting the more important SVC layers through the spatial channels with higher channel gains. However, in our proposed scheme, the bit stream of each particular SVC layer is distributed to multiple spatial channels so that additional diversity gain can be exploited by applying APP-FEC. The UEP can also be achieved by allocating different APP-FEC coding rates on each video layer. Moreover, transmit power allocation is also effectively and jointly determined to improve the system performance. The effectiveness and favorable performance of our proposed scheme are shown by simulations with H.264 SVC traces of high-definition video clips over MIMO systems.