Robust transmission of JPEG-2000 images over peer-to-peer mixed wired and wireless links

Robust image transmission over mixed wired and wireless networks constitutes a significant challenge due to limited bandwidth, the error prone and time varying characteristics of the wireless radio channel and the highly dynamic nature of a heterogeneous network topology. The latest JPEG-2000 image standard provides efficient and flexible image compression based on coding an image into multiple quality layers. The paper presents a multi-quality transmission scheme in a distributed network architecture for robust transmission of JPEG-2000 images over a peer-to-peer mixed wired and wireless link. The network is ad-hoc in nature, with each peer within the network sensing each of the others for best effort image transmission. Experiments over various distributed mixed wired and wireless network topologies show that this scheme guarantees successful image transmission as long as good links are available among peers, even though the direct link between initiating and destination peers may be congested or broken. The scheme improves end-to-end processing time when more intermediate peers are available in the network. The advantages of employing multiple layer image transmission are: (1) non-initiating peers are allowed to participate in image routing and to share the additional bandwidth with fair QoS support, which is especially beneficial in the low bandwidth network architecture involved, such as GPRS; (2) cost-effective solutions are provided for visual communications among ad-hoc mobile peers with smaller screen-size and lower processing power.