Applying ARQ to real time video communication can significantly increase transmission delay due its retransmission operations. We analyze this delay and propose an adaptive error control scheme that uses acknowledgment from the receiver to reduce the delay. We evaluate this scheme using a computer simulation and show that the proposed scheme can reduce the delay by controlling the amount of video data by changing the quantization step size and video frame skipping. It also offers acceptable video quality as confirmed by a subjective evaluation test.

This paper describes the performance of a video communication system over mobile radio channels. Mobile channel quality changes rapidly due to various factors. When compressed video data is transmitted through these channels, it is indispensable to employ an error control scheme because reconstructed video quality is seriously degraded by channel error. To control this error, an automatic repeat request (ARQ) scheme is often employed, however, this incurs a cost. The benefit of a non-degraded reconstructed video sequence is offset by the transmission delay due to ARQ retransmission. We apply to a video communication system a selective-repeat ARQ which is combined with the coding control scheme to reduce the transmission delay. We evaluate the quality of the reconstructed video sequence and transmission delay using computer simulations and make clear its applicability over Rayleigh and Nakagami-Rican fading channels and intersymbol interference.