Unequal Protection of Video Streaming through Adaptive Modulation with a Trizone Buffer over Bluetooth Enhanced Data Rate

Bluetooth enhanced data rate wireless channel can support higher-quality video streams compared to previous versions of Bluetooth. Packet loss when transmitting compressed data has an effect on the delivered video quality that endures over multiple frames. To reduce the impact of radio frequency noise and interference, this paper proposes adaptive modulation based on content type at the video frame level and content importance at the macroblock level. Because the bit rate of protected data is reduced, the paper proposes buffer management to reduce the risk of buffer overflow. A trizone buffer is introduced, with a varying unequal protection policy in each zone. Application of this policy together with adaptive modulation results in up to 4 dB improvement in objective video quality compared to fixed rate scheme for an additive white Gaussian noise channel and around 10 dB for a Gilbert-Elliott channel. The paper also reports a consistent improvement in video quality over a scheme that adapts to channel conditions by varying the data rate without accounting for the video frame packet type or buffer congestion.

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Authors and Affiliations

1. Electronic Systems Engineering Department, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, CO4 3SQ, UK

   Rouzbeh Razavi, Martin Fleury & Mohammed Ghanbari

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Martin Fleury.

Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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