MCast: High-Quality Linear Video Transmission with Time and Frequency Diversities

Uncoded linear video transmission has recently attracted people's attention due to its capacity to provide robust and scalable transmission. However, in reality, with the fluctuation of the wireless channels, the received quality may not be good enough. In such a case, the data may need to be transmitted multiple times to exploit both the time and frequency diversities to improve the received quality. Such a problem has never been investigated in the literature of uncoded video transmission. To resolve the problem, in this paper, we propose a framework, named MCast, to utilize the time and frequency diversities to achieve high-quality linear video transmission. We study how to optimally allocate the power and assign the channels at each time slot to the source data such that the overall performance is maximized. Specifically, we first derive a closed-form optimal power allocation solution for any given channel assignment. With the optimal power allocation, we then propose a suboptimal channel assignment scheme, where we sort the channels with their gains and assign the channels one-by-one to the corresponding block that can reduce the most reconstruction error. Finally, we compare MCast system with four other systems that are based on Softcast and Parcast, and simulation results show that MCast system can achieve better performance in terms of both PSNR performance and visual quality.