A cross-layer approach for energy efficient transmission of progressively coded images over wireless channels

Mobility, made available by today's communication networks, imposes several limitations in the design of multimedia applications, due to high error rates, reduced bandwidth, strong variability, and mobile terminals lifetime. This paper investigates the use of an energy constrained cross-layer approach for the transmission of progressively coded images over packet-based wireless channels. We propose an optimum power allocation algorithm to enable unequal error protection of a pre-encoded image. Simulations are performed modeling transmission over a Rayleigh fading channel. The investigation focuses on JPEG2000, but it is applicable to other progressively coded bitstreams as well. Our experimental results demonstrate that it is possible to achieve a relevant performance enhancement with the proposed approach over uniform error protection. The optimal solution can also serve as a guideline for developing less computationally intensive empiric approaches.