Channel modeling and its effect on the end-to-end distortion in wireless video communications

A major limitation faced by a mobile user is their dependence on a limited battery supply. For wireless video communications, joint source coding and transmission power management (JSCPM) has recently been considered as a means of efficiently allocating transmission energy. In order to reduce complexity, the design of many of these adaptive resource allocation algorithms utilizes simplified channel models that do not account for the burstiness of the channel. We analyze the effects of such channel model simplifications on the end-to-end distortion. We present a channel model that is based on information theoretic considerations, which captures the bursty nature of wireless channels and accounts for packet lengths when calculating the probability of loss. Given the source coding and transmission parameters derived using a simplified channel model, our goal is to analyze how the end-to-end distortion is affected when a more realistic complex channel model is used to simulate losses. Experimental results suggest that the performance gain predictions for JSCPM using a simpler channel model are also valid when more sophisticated channel simulations are used, provided that a number of additional steps are taken after the optimization to account for the complex characteristics of wireless channels.