Comparative analysis of a twin-class M-QAM transmission system for wireless video applications

This paper presents a unique set of techniques to support reliable and efficient video transmission over mobile channels. The transmission system is comprised of an M level Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) technique. A twin class uniform and non-uniform partitioned M-QAM system is used to transport a compressed video bitstream which is partitioned to match the bit-error sensitivity of the transmitted symbol in terms of mapping in the constellation diagram and picture quality. Video partitioning based on a separation of the Variable Length Coded (VLC) Discrete Cosine Transforms (DCT) coefficients within each block is considered for constant bitrate transmission (CBR). Various scenarios for splitting the bitstream are investigated and their results are compared and analysed thoroughly. The performance of the transmission system is evaluated under Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) conditions. The simulation results showed that the video partition strategy results in a significantly higher quality of the reconstructed video data.