This paper examines the effectiveness of combining multiple description coding (MDC) and multiple path transport (MPT) for video and image transmission in a multihop mobile radio network. The video and image information is encoded nonhierarchically into multiple descriptions with the following objectives. The received picture quality should be acceptable, even if only one description is received and every additional received description contributes to enhanced picture quality. Typical applications will need a higher bandwidth/higher reliability connection than that provided by a single link in current mobile networks. For supporting these applications, a mobile node may need to set up and use multiple paths to the desired destination, either simply because of the lack of raw bandwidth on a single channel or because of its poor error characteristics, which reduce its effective throughput. In the context of this work, the principal reasons for considering such an architecture are providing high bandwidth and more robust end-to-end connections. We describe a protocol architecture that addresses this need and, with the help of simulations, we demonstrate the feasibility of this system and compare the performance of the MDC-MPT scheme to a system using layered coding and asymmetrical paths for the base and enhancement layers.

Abstract—Block coding based on the discrete cosine transform (DCT) is very popular in image and video compression. Pre/post-filtering can be attached to a DCT-based block coding system to improve coding efficiency as well as to mitigate blocking artifacts. Previously designed pre/post-filters are optimized to maximize coding efficiency solely. For image and video communication over unreliable channels, those pre/post-filters are sensitive to transmission errors. This paper addresses the problem of designing pre/post-filters which are more error resilient. Reconstruction performance is measured by how low the average reconstruction error is, and how uniformly the reconstruction error is distributed. A family of pre/post-filters is designed to provide desired tradeoffs between coding efficiency and robustness to transmission errors. Experiments show that these filtering operators can achieve superior reconstruction performance without sacrificing much coding performance. Index Terms—Block coding, discrete cosine transform (DCT), error resilience, pre/post-filtering. I.