Outdoor Propagation Link Budget Effect on Wireless Real Time Video Transmission

Real Time Video Wireless Transmission (RTVWT) combines telecommunications and imaging in order to provide remote video transmission. By removing distance barriers, it improves access to different services that would often not be regularly available in distant rural communities. It also saves lives in critical scenarios like healthcare, oil field inspection, monitoring oil and gas pipelines, and security. Wireless networks constantly suffer from different factors like bad weather conditions, fading and multipath interference, which lead to weak signals entailing packet losses or delays and rendering unacceptable video quality. This paper represents a performance study of link budget analysis (LBA) for short-range operation of remote sensing and its effects on video quality, in which both experimental and theoretical levels have been considered. The analysis presented is based on measurements conducted in a complex environment, such as an open field by the Computer Center building of the University of Birmingham during the snowy weather with surrounding vegetation. The link budget is calculated by initially measuring the input received power of a transmitted continuous wave (CW) signal at 2.45 GHz frequency at different distances from the transmitter, and then calculating the path loss for each scenario while taking the fading effect into account. Measured path loss was compared to the Two Ray (Ground Reflection) and Free Space Path Loss models in order to describe the received power for the specified remote sensing system. Outage analysis is made at the final stage.