A fuzzy approach to video transmission over Bluetooth ACL links

This paper is concerned with transmission of Moving Picture Expert Group (MPEG) video over a Bluetooth wireless network, using fuzzy controllers. MPEG Variable Bit Rate (VBR) data sources are unpredictable and have substantial variations in bit rate. Subsequently, it is almost impossible to transmit the VBR data sources over a Bluetooth channel with a limited transmission speed of up to 723.2 kb/s, and the wireless interference, without data loss or image quality degradation. To resolve this problem, a traffic-shaping buffer is introduced before the Host Controller Interface (HCI). In Bluetooth the traffic-shaping buffer prevents excessive back-to-back cells being generated during the peak transmissions of MPEG VBR data sources. In this research, a fuzzy controller adjusts the traffic-shaping buffer output rate to enable the VBR encoded video to conform to the current situation in the Bluetooth channel. Another fuzzy controller regulates the average arrival rate to the traffic-shaping buffer to prevent either overflow or starvation of the buffer. The computer simulation results demonstrate that the use of the fuzzy controllers reduce excessive delay and data loss at the HCI as compared with a conventional video transmission in Bluetooth.