One of the most important components of any wireless network is the medium access control protocol. This research deals with wireless ATM (WATM) medium access control (MAC) protocol. Conventional studies concerning WATM have focused mainly on variations of the time-division-multiple-access (TDMA) method for the wireless aspect of WATM networks. However, there are many advantages that the direct-sequence code-division-multiple-access (DS-CDMA) air-interface method has, such as inherent robustness against multipath fading, better resilience against security infringement attempts, and greater overall capacity compared to the TDMA method as proven in the cellular telephone industry. The main reason behind the relatively broader support for the TDMA method is that the source bit rate is generally higher compared to the DS-CDMA method since the maximum data rate per mobile unit is limited by the processing gain of a traditional DS-CDMA method. In this research, the problem of limited data rate often associated with a DS-CDMA air-interface is alleviated by employing the recently conceived multi-coded DS-CDMA as the primary air-interface, which is known to achieve maximum data rate per mobile unit comparable to applications employing TDMA. The focus of this research is on overcoming periods of significant deterioration of the wireless channel by adaptively employing bit combining. A MAC protocol called Adaptive Parallel Multiple Sub-stream CDMA (APMS-CDMA) is proposed to alternate between normal and ¡°rake-in¡± mode to deal with the often hostile environment of a WATM network. Although the context in which this research effort was conducted was a wireless ATM network environment, the protocol and techniques developed here can be applied to other infrastructure wireless systems using multi-code CDMA as their air-interface. Further, independent of the air-interface technique employed, other wireless systems can benefit from the channel estimation and the traffic management techniques used in this research effort. / Ph. D.

<p>This dissertation considers packet-switched wireless networks for transmission of variable-rate layered hybrid video streams. Target applications are video streaming and broadcasting services. The work can be divided into two main parts.</p><p>In the first part, a novel quality-scalable scheme based on coefficient refinement and encoder quality constraints is developed as a possible extension to the video coding standard H.264. After a technical introduction to the coding tools of H.264 with the main focus on error resilience features, various quality scalability schemes in previous research are reviewed. Based on this discussion, an encoder decoder framework is designed for an arbitrary number of quality layers, hereby also enabling region-of-interest coding. After that, the performance of the new system is exhaustively tested, showing that the bit rate increase typically encountered with scalable hybrid coding schemes is, for certain coding parameters, only small to moderate. The double- and triple-layer constellations of the framework are shown to perform superior to other systems.</p><p>The second part considers layered code streams as generated by the scheme of the first part. Various error propagation issues in hybrid streams are discussed, which leads to the definition of a decoder quality constraint and a segmentation of the code stream to transmit. A packetization scheme based on successive source rate consumption is drafted, followed by the formulation of the channel code rate optimization problem for an optimum assignment of available codes to the channel packets. Proper MSE-based error metrics are derived, incorporating the properties of the source signal, a terminate-on-error decoding strategy, error concealment, inter-packet dependencies, and the channel conditions. The Viterbi algorithm is presented as a low-complexity solution to the optimization problem, showing a great adaptivity of the joint source channel coding scheme to the channel conditions. An almost constant image qualiity is achieved, also in mismatch situations, while the overall channel code rate decreases only as little as necessary as the channel quality deteriorates. It is further shown that the variance of code distributions is only small, and that the codes are assigned irregularly to all channel packets.</p><p>A double-layer constellation of the framework clearly outperforms other schemes with a substantial margin. </p><p>Keywords — Digital lossy video compression, visual communication, variable bit rate (VBR), SNR scalability, layered image processing, quality layer, hybrid code stream, predictive coding, progressive bit stream, joint source channel coding, fidelity constraint, channel error robustness, resilience, concealment, packet-switched, mobile and wireless ATM, noisy transmission, packet loss, binary symmetric channel, streaming, broadcasting, satellite and radio links, H.264, MPEG-4 AVC, Viterbi, trellis, unequal error protection</p>

This dissertation considers packet-switched wireless networks for transmission of variable-rate layered hybrid video streams. Target applications are video streaming and broadcasting services. The work can be divided into two main parts. In the first part, a novel quality-scalable scheme based on coefficient refinement and encoder quality constraints is developed as a possible extension to the video coding standard H.264. After a technical introduction to the coding tools of H.264 with the main focus on error resilience features, various quality scalability schemes in previous research are reviewed. Based on this discussion, an encoder decoder framework is designed for an arbitrary number of quality layers, hereby also enabling region-of-interest coding. After that, the performance of the new system is exhaustively tested, showing that the bit rate increase typically encountered with scalable hybrid coding schemes is, for certain coding parameters, only small to moderate. The double- and triple-layer constellations of the framework are shown to perform superior to other systems. The second part considers layered code streams as generated by the scheme of the first part. Various error propagation issues in hybrid streams are discussed, which leads to the definition of a decoder quality constraint and a segmentation of the code stream to transmit. A packetization scheme based on successive source rate consumption is drafted, followed by the formulation of the channel code rate optimization problem for an optimum assignment of available codes to the channel packets. Proper MSE-based error metrics are derived, incorporating the properties of the source signal, a terminate-on-error decoding strategy, error concealment, inter-packet dependencies, and the channel conditions. The Viterbi algorithm is presented as a low-complexity solution to the optimization problem, showing a great adaptivity of the joint source channel coding scheme to the channel conditions. An almost constant image qualiity is achieved, also in mismatch situations, while the overall channel code rate decreases only as little as necessary as the channel quality deteriorates. It is further shown that the variance of code distributions is only small, and that the codes are assigned irregularly to all channel packets. A double-layer constellation of the framework clearly outperforms other schemes with a substantial margin. Keywords — Digital lossy video compression, visual communication, variable bit rate (VBR), SNR scalability, layered image processing, quality layer, hybrid code stream, predictive coding, progressive bit stream, joint source channel coding, fidelity constraint, channel error robustness, resilience, concealment, packet-switched, mobile and wireless ATM, noisy transmission, packet loss, binary symmetric channel, streaming, broadcasting, satellite and radio links, H.264, MPEG-4 AVC, Viterbi, trellis, unequal error protection