Reliable full motion video services in disadvantaged tactical radio networks

Abstract

Today's “connected soldier” is both the source of and destination for electronically transmitted data used by an ever growing range of battlefield information services. In much the same way as the demand for new video services has driven innovation in the consumer domain, the acquisition and dissemination of high resolution Full Motion Video (FMV), either for surveillance and intelligence gathering purposes or to provide immediate situational awareness, is becoming an increasingly important component of NATO's C3 collaborative working taxonomy. However, the bandwidth-intensive, delay and loss intolerant nature of high resolution FMV transmission means that there are still challenges in transmitting over disconnected, intermittent and limited (DIL) networks such as those often found in tactical edge radio networks. This paper proposes a robust video streaming service, as part of a service oriented architecture for DIL tactical networks, that is based on the newest H.265 video encoding standards. The proposed service uses H.265 specific unequal error protection and selective packet dropping to ensure that the most important packets (in terms of image quality and decoding robustness) of a video are successfully delivered. The results of a comprehensive empirical evaluation show that the proposed video streaming service delivers a video quality improvement of up to 2.1 dB Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) over H.265 streamed with no UEP support. Additionally, it also demonstrated that the H.265 proposed service requires an average of 39% less bandwidth than the current H.264 video encoding service recommended in STANAG 4609, while delivering video of a similar perceptual quality.