Multi-Channel Adaptive Transport Of Multi-Media Streaming Over Wireless

Multimedia streaming communication over lossy packet networks such as the mobile wireless network is hampered by limited bandwidth and packet loss. This paper presents a system to provide a reliable multimedia communication over such networks.Our system contains two subsystems: (1) multiple description encoder/decoder over wireless and (2) a multi-path self-adoptive transmission system. Multiple description coding addresses the problem of error propagation at the decode side by dividing the data into several independently decodable streams, each with its own prediction process and state. If any stream is lost during transmission, the others can still be decoded to provide usable video/audio. What's more, those correctly received data contain bidirectional (previous and future) information that helps to improve state recovery for the corrupted data. The multi-path self-adoptive transmission system sends different subsets of packets over different paths; differ from usual case which packets go along a single path, thereby providing a better average path. We call this multi-path diversity. Generally, this average path behavior provides better performance than any individual random path.We implement a system for achieving path diversity, and examine the effectiveness of path diversity in communicating video over a lossy packet network. The result is encouraging.