An experimental investigation of an M level (M = 16, 64 and 256) Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) transmission system suitable for video transmission is presented. The communication system is based on layered video coding and unequal error protection to make the video bitstream robust to channel errors. An implementation is described in which H.264 video is protected unequally by partitioning the compressed data into two layers of different visual importance. The partition scheme is based on a separation of the group of pictures (GoP) in the intra-coded frame (I-frame) and predictive coded frame (P frame). This partition scheme is then applied to split the H.264-coded video bitstream and is suitable for Constant Bit Rate (CBR) transmission. Unequal error protection is based on uniform and non-uniform M-QAM constellations in conjunction with different scenarios of splitting the transmitted symbol for protection of the more important information of the video data; different constellation arrangements are proposed and evaluated to increase the capacity of the high priority layer. The performance of the transmission system is evaluated under Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) and Rayleigh fading conditions. Simulation results showed that in noisy channels the decoded video can be improved by assigning a larger portion of the video data to the enhancement layer in conjunction with non-uniform constellation arrangements; in better channel conditions the quality of the received video can be improved by assigning more bits in the high priority channel and using uniform constellations. The aforementioned varying conditions can make the video transmission more successful over error-prone channels. Further techniques were developed to combat various channel impairments by considering channel coding methods suitable for layered video coding applications. It is shown that a combination of non-uniform M-QAM and forward error correction (FEC) will yield a better performance. Additionally, antenna diversity techniques are examined and introduced to the transmission system that can offer a significant improvement in the quality of service of mobile video communication systems in environments that can be modelled by a Rayleigh fading channel.

An experimental investigation of an M level (M = 16, 64 and 256) Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) transmission system suitable for video transmission is presented. The communication system is based on layered video coding and unequal error protection to make the video bitstream robust to channel errors. An implementation is described in which H.264 video is protected unequally by partitioning the compressed data into two layers of different visual importance. The partition scheme is based on a separation of the group of pictures (GoP) in the intra-coded frame (I-frame) and predictive coded frame (P frame). This partition scheme is then applied to split the H.264-coded video bitstream and is suitable for Constant Bit Rate (CBR) transmission. Unequal error protection is based on uniform and non-uniform M-QAM constellations in conjunction with different scenarios of splitting the transmitted symbol for protection of the more important information of the video data; different constellation arrangements are proposed and evaluated to increase the capacity of the high priority layer. The performance of the transmission system is evaluated under Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) and Rayleigh fading conditions. Simulation results showed that in noisy channels the decoded video can be improved by assigning a larger portion of the video data to the enhancement layer in conjunction with non-uniform constellation arrangements; in better channel conditions the quality of the received video can be improved by assigning more bits in the high priority channel and using uniform constellations. The aforementioned varying conditions can make the video transmission more successful over error-prone channels. Further techniques were developed to combat various channel impairments by considering channel coding methods suitable for layered video coding applications. It is shown that a combination of non-uniform M-QAM and forward error correction (FEC) will yield a better performance. Additionally, antenna diversity techniques are examined and introduced to the transmission system that can offer a significant improvement in the quality of service of mobile video communication systems in environments that can be modelled by a Rayleigh fading channel.

Due to the highly-varying wireless channels over time, frequency, and space domains, statistical QoS provisioning, instead of deterministic QoS guarantees, has become a recognized feature in the next-generation wireless networks. In this dissertation, we study the adaptive wireless resource allocation problems for statistical QoS provisioning, such as guaranteeing the specified delay-bound violation probability, upper-bounding the average loss-rate, optimizing the average goodput/throughput, etc., in several typical types of mobile wireless networks. In the first part of this dissertation, we study the statistical QoS provisioning for mobile multicast through the adaptive resource allocations, where different multicast receivers attempt to receive the common messages from a single base-station sender over broadcast fading channels. Because of the heterogeneous fading across different multicast receivers, both instantaneously and statistically, how to design the efficient adaptive rate control and resource allocation for wireless multicast is a widely cited open problem. We first study the time-sharing based goodput-optimization problem for non-realtime multicast services. Then, to more comprehensively characterize the QoS provisioning problems for mobile multicast with diverse QoS requirements, we further integrate the statistical delay-QoS control techniques — effective capacity theory, statistical loss-rate control, and information theory to propose a QoS-driven optimization framework. Applying this framework and solving for the corresponding optimization problem, we identify the optimal tradeoff among statistical delay-QoS requirements, sustainable traffic load, and the average loss rate through the adaptive resource allocations and queue management. Furthermore, we study the adaptive resource allocation problems for multi-layer video multicast to satisfy diverse statistical delay and loss QoS requirements over different video layers. In addition, we derive the efficient adaptive erasure-correction coding scheme for the packet-level multicast, where the erasure-correction code is dynamically constructed based on multicast receivers’ packet-loss statuses, to achieve high error-control efficiency in mobile multicast networks. In the second part of this dissertation, we design the adaptive resource allocation schemes for QoS provisioning in unicast based wireless networks, with emphasis on statistical delay-QoS guarantees. First, we develop the QoS-driven time-slot and power allocation schemes for multi-user downlink transmissions (with independent messages) in cellular networks to maximize the delay-QoS-constrained sum system throughput. Second, we propose the delay-QoS-aware base-station selection schemes in distributed multiple-input-multiple-output systems. Third, we study the queueaware spectrum sensing in cognitive radio networks for statistical delay-QoS provisioning. Analyses and simulations are presented to show the advantages of our proposed schemes and the impact of delay-QoS requirements on adaptive resource allocations in various environments.