H.264/AVC for wireless applications

Video transmission in wireless environments is a challenging task calling for high compression effi-ciency as well as a network friendly design. These have been major goals of the H.264/AVC stan-dardization effort addressing "conversational" (i.e., video telephony) and "non-conversational" (i.e., storage, broadcast, or streaming) applications. The video compression performance of the H.264/AVC Video Coding Layer typically provides a significant improvement. The network-friendly design goal of H.264/AVC is addressed via the Network Abstraction Layer that has been developed to transport the coded video data over any existing and future networks including wireless systems. The main objec-tive of this paper is to provide an overview over the tools which are likely to be used in wireless envi-ronments and discusses the most challenging application, wireless conversational services in greater detail. Appropriate justifications for the application of different tools based on experimental results are presented.