The most commonly used transport protocol, TCP (Transport Control protocol) reacts to loss by throttling the transmission rate. This impacts performance if the loss is non-congestion related, corruption loss. A link layer protocol may use ARQ to provide reliability and shield TCP from corruption loss. The advantage of fragmentation together with link ARQ is; it is able to retransmit the requested frame and instead of the entire data packet. For a link to perform transparent fragmentation, an adaption layer (AL) protocol is needed. Although link ARQ may improve TCP performance, it introduces undesirable delay (i.e. receiver side head of line blocking) and negatively impacts the end-to-end TCP performance. This thesis presents new results on the impacts link ARQ have on the <i>cwnd </i>(congestion window) limited TCP sessions sharing the same link ARQ. To minimise the delay, we proposed to use a more assertive link layer protocol (APRIL). To eliminate the interaction between classes of flow sharing the link with ARQ, flow isolation is required. We discussed the role of the virtual channel (VC) and how it can be used to provide flow isolation. We identified the role of the VC as related to the reassembly process at the receiver end. It allows different traffic classes/flows to be reassembled independently. Therefore, multiple reassembly processes are desirable, one for each traffic class/flow. Our novel approach performs reassembly in the link receive buffer, without demultiplexing frames into the respective channel (as in ATM and X.25) to eliminate the interaction between flows sent on different virtual channel. An approach to increase the robustness of sequence number wrapping in a VC reassembly process without increasing the protocol overhead is also proposed. The inefficiency in the multiple reassembly processes is discussed in the thesis. A simple reassembly process requires massive CPU effort at the receiver since it does not know what exists in the buffer before the process is triggered. We proposed the use of three lists, channel, retransmission and suspended list to minimise this inefficiency in the multiple reassembly processes. During link layer frame processing, it updates all the VC encountered in the block in the channel and retransmission lists. The adaption layer can refer back to these lists prior commencing reassembly process. Therefore, irrelevant blocks, frames and VC can be identified and ignored during the reassembly process. We demonstrate that these lists greatly reduced the processing cost.

Multiview video is one of the emerging research areas especially among the video coding community. Transmission of multiview video over an error prone network is possible with efficient compression of these videos. But along with the studies for efficiently compressing the multiview video, new error concealment and error protection methods are also necessary to overcome the problems due to erroneous channel conditions in practical applications. In packet switching networks, packet losses may lead to block losses in a frame or the loss of an entire frame in an encoded video sequence. In recent years several algorithms are proposed to handle the loss of an entire frame efficiently. However methods for full frame losses in stereoscopic or multiview videos are limited in the literature. In this thesis a stereoscopic approach for full frame loss concealment of multiview video is proposed. In the proposed methods, the redundancy and disparity between the views and motion information between the previously decoded frames are used to estimate the lost frame. Even though multiview video can be composed of more than two views, at most three view are utilized for concealment. The performance of the proposed algorithms are tested against monoscopic methods and the conditions under which the proposed methods are superior are investigated. The proposed algorithms are applied to both stereoscopic and multiview video.

The advances in multimedia technologies increased the interest in utilizing three dimensional (3D) video applications in mobile devices. However, wireless transmission is significantly prone to errors. Typically, packets may be corrupted or lost due to transmission errors, causing blocking artifacts. Furthermore, because of compression and coding, the error propagates through the sequence and salient features of the video cannot be recovered until a key-frame or synchronization-frame is correctly received. Without the use of concealment and enhancement techniques, visible artifacts would inevitably and regularly appear in the decoded stream. In this thesis, error concealment techniques for full frame losses in depth plus video and stereo video structures are implemented and compared. Temporal and interview correlations are utilized to predict the lost frames while considering the memory usage and computational complexity.The concealment methods are implemented on jm17.2 decoder which is based on H.264/AVC specifications [1]. The simulation results are compared with the simple frame copy (FC) method for different sequences having different characteristics.

[pt] Este trabalho examina o impacto da quantização vetorial das LSFs sobre a qualidade de voz em codecs a baixas taxas operando em redes IP e em diversos ambientes ruidosos. São considerados diferentes esquemas de quantização vetorial (QV) multiestágio com busca em árvore envolvendo QV sem memória e QV preditiva chaveada com 2 e 4 classes. A distribuição de perda de quadros em redes IP foi modelada de acordo com o Modelo de Gilbert e a avaliação de desempenho foi realizada tanto em termos das distorções espectrais como da qualidade de voz resultante de codecs a baixas taxas. Ainda neste trabalho, foi avaliada a qualidade da voz codificada após a utilização de uma técnica de supressão de ruído baseada em transformadas wavelets (Wavelet Denoising). / [en] This work investigates the impact of LSF vector quantisation over the voice quality in low rate codecs operating in IP networks. Tree-structured multistage vector quantisation (VQ) schemes involving memoryless VQ and switched-predictive VQ with 2 and 4 classes are considered. The packet loss frame distribution in IP networks was modelled according to the Gilbert Model and the performance was carried out both in terms of spectral distortions and the speech quality at the out put of low rate codecs. In this work, we also evaluated the quality of the coded speech after employing Wavelet Denoising.

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico / This work presents the implementation of three architectures of UDP/IP network stack in reconfigurable hardware. Also, presents the development of a Tester based on the RFC 2544 methodology and implemented it in FPGA. This Tester was used to obtain the throughput, latency and frame loss rate results. The performance of the project shows, in average, throughput results 89% better in comparison with a network stack implemented in software (PC) and running over a general purpose microprocessor, for frames with 64 bytes. Regarding latency, the project is 389 times lower for frames with 64 bytes and 13 times lower for frames with 1518 bytes, than the PC. On behalf of frame loss rate, the project doesn t loss frames for any frame sizes used during the tests, while the PC has presented a frame loss of almost 98% for frames with 64 bytes. / Este trabalho apresenta a implementação de três arquiteturas da pilha de comunicação UDP/IP em hardware reconfigurável. Também apresenta o desenvolvimento de um Testador baseado na metodologia da RFC 2544 e implementado em uma placa dotada de dispositivo FPGA. Esse Testador foi utilizado na obtenção dos resultados de vazão, latência e taxa de perda de quadros. O desempenho do projeto apresentou, em média, 89% a mais de vazão, para quadros de 64 bytes, que uma pilha de comunicação implementada em software (PC) e executada sobre um microprocessador de propósito geral. Em termos de latência, o projeto apresentou uma latência 389 vezes menor para quadros de 64 bytes e 13 vezes menor para quadros de 1518 bytes, que o PC. E em relação à taxa de perda de quadros, o projeto não apresentou perda para nenhum dos tamanhos de quadros utilizados durante os testes, enquanto o PC apresentou perda de quase 98% para quadros de 64 bytes.