Reliable UAV Video Streaming Over 5.9 GHz and mmWave Bands: Comparative Analysis With Fountain Codes in Urban and Industrial Environments

Authors:
Open Access
Publisher website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Reliable video streaming is a critical requirement for emerging unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) applications such as surveillance, disaster response, and industrial inspection. Achieving this requirement is challenging under dynamic wireless channel conditions and varying propagation environments. This study evaluates Luby transform (LT)‐fountain‐coded UAV video streaming over 5.9 GHz and 30 GHz links in outdoor urban macro (UMa) and indoor factory (InF) environments. Standardized 3GPP channel models are applied under both line‐of‐sight (LoS) and mixed LoS/non‐line‐of‐sight (NLoS) conditions. The evaluation distinguishes packet‐level wireless reliability from video‐streaming performance. Packet‐level reliability is characterized using signal‐to‐noise ratio and packet‐erasure behaviour, while video‐streaming performance is evaluated using frame recovery success rate, LT‐coded symbol demand, effective coding rate, delivered application‐layer throughput, and coded‐frame delivery latency. LT coding is assessed in terms of its ability to recover video frames under erasure conditions, its required redundancy overhead, and its impact on decoding success and effective rate. Simulation results show that 5.9 GHz links maintain more robust connectivity over longer distances, achieving lower packet‐erasure rates and higher frame recovery success rates. The 30 GHz configuration offers higher nominal bandwidth but is more sensitive to path loss, blockage, and LoS/NLoS transitions, particularly in InF and NLoS scenarios. These findings highlight the trade‐offs between wireless robustness and video‐level performance across frequency bands and environments. The results further show that LT fountain coding improves frame‐recovery reliability while maintaining sub‐second coded‐frame delivery latency under the adopted contention‐free scheduled‐link abstraction.

This publication has 31 references indexed in Scilit: