Based on the fast evolution of wireless networks and multimedia compression technologies in recent years, real-time multimedia transmission over wireless networks will be the next step for the implementation of contemporary communication system. Lower bandwidth and higher loss rate make wireless networks hard to transmit multimedia content than its wired counterpart. In addition, the common delay constraint from real-time multimedia transmission raises the challenges for the design of wireless communication system. This dissertation proposes an adaptive unequal error protection (UEP) and packet size assignment scheme for scalable video transmission over a burst error channel. An analytic model is developed to evaluate the impact of channel bit-error-rate on the quality of streaming scalable video. A video transmission scheme, which combines the adaptive assignment of packet size with unequal error protection to increase the end-to-end video quality is proposed. Several distinct scalable video transmission schemes over burst-error channel have been compared, and the simulation results reveal that the proposed transmission schemes can react to varying channel conditions with less and smoother quality degradation. Furthermore, in order to meet the real time need in many video transmission applications, this dissertation has proposed low time-complexity packet size assignment schemes. Meanwhile, from the test result, it can be seen that although this method has sacrificed a little bit video quality as compared to optimized method, yet it can adapt to all kinds of network situations and display smoother quality and performance. Moreover, as compared to optimized method, this strategy greatly reduces the calculation time-complexity.

Future wireless networks will be required to support multimedia traffic in addition to traditional best-effort network services. Supporting multimedia traffic on wired networks presents a large number of design problems, particularly for networks that run connectionless data transport protocols such as the TCP/IP protocol suite. These problems are magnified for wireless links, as the quality of such links varies widely and uncontrollably. This dissertation presents new tools developed for the design and realization of wireless networks including, for the first time, analytical channel models for predicting the efficacy of error control codes, interleaving schemes, and signalling protocols, and several novel algorithms for matching and adapting system parameters (such as error control and frame length) to time-varying channels and Quality of Service (QoS) requirements.