MPEG-2 coded video traces transmitted over a satellite link: Scalable and non-scalable solutions in rain fading conditions

The literature is poor in the analyses of the effects produced by corrupted bits in compressed video bitstreams. This paper presents the results of a transmission experiment of MPEG-2 coded video data over a satellite link affected by noise, in order to investigate under which conditions this type of transmission is economically feasible. The signal-to-noise ratio scalability feature of the MPEG-2 encoder was used to produce different bitstreams of the same movie sequence. The scope of the study was to verify which are the best combinations of video and channel codings in the presence of attenuation on the satellite link, in order to optimize the bandwidth utilization for a requested image quality. The results obtained give indications about the data channel codings to be used to counter the rain fade on the transmission link, which is a non negligible problem especially when satellite transmissions are in the Ka band. Moreover, the results highlight the flexibility of the scalable video coding in the examined scenario.