Multimedia applications over wireless channels have received a great attention recently. This demand for such applications has motivated many researchers to design and provide various transmission strategies and schemes. Despite all improvements in multimedia transmission techniques and wireless network infrastructure, still many challenges exist in providing an acceptable level of Quality of Service (QoS) for these applications.

In this thesis we start with looking at the distortion-optimal schemes for video transmission over a wireless channel. We identify an analytical expression for the expected distortion of a single layer video bitstream. Utilizing this model, we provide a low complexity Unequal Error Protection (UEP) method for transmitting the sequence over a tandem channel, considering the priority of different types of frames in the video sequence, as well as the channel conditions.

Then we extend our work by considering a scalable video bitstream including both Base Layer (BL) and Enhancement Layer (EL). Assuming the BL is received free of error, we propose an expected distortion model for progressive EL. A low-complexity distortion-optimal budget allocation scheme is provided here for EL transmission over such a channel with both bit errors and packet erasures.

Utilizing the provided expected models and transmission schemes, we propose an analytical expression to model a scalable video bitstream including both BL and EL bitstreams. Considering the different priority of BL and EL bitstreams, we allocate the total transmission budget among these bitstreams and transmit them with the previously proposed distortion-optimal UEP schemes over a wireless channel.

In the next step, we provide a rate-optimal method for transmitting a single layer video over a Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) wireless channel considering bit errors. In this part of our work, we propose a low-complexity algorithm to select the best available source rate, channel code rate and Space-Time Code (STC) to maximize the probability of bitstream recovery at the receiver side, considering the channel conditions.