Can video streaming over mobile broadband networks be improved?

Press release issued: 15 July 2014 Due to the increase in smartphone video applications, mobile video traffic is rising significantly. New research has shown how videos can be better transmitted over wireless links such as Wi-Fi and 4G. The study by Professor Andrew Nix and Dr Victoria Sgardoni from the University of Bristol's Communication Systems & Networks group is published in the journal, IEEE Transactions for Mobile Computing. It is well known that video dominates Internet traffic and by 2018 it is expected wired devices will account for 39 per cent of Internet Protocol (IP) traffic, while Wi-Fi and mobile devices will account for 61 per cent of IP traffic. The researchers propose a new approach for high-quality video transmission over wireless links. As shown in the cross-layer system simulator figure, they suggest cross-packet forward error correction (FEC) codes, such as Raptor codes, are applied at the application layer (AL) to allow the AL decoder to regenerate packets that were lost over the radio and network layers. The paper explains how the adaptation of the radio layer depends on the parameters of the application layer coding, through Raptor-aware Link Adaptation and a cross-layer optimisation approach.