Performance evaluation of error control schemes for distributed video coding over wireless multimedia sensor networks Mortaza Nikzad 1 & Ali Bohlooli 1 & Kamal Jamshidi 1 Received: 16 April 2017 /Revised: 17 September 2017 /Accepted: 5 November 2017 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2017 Abstract Distributed Video Coding (DVC) is a new approach in video coding which due to low computational complexity at the encoder side, has a great potential to be used in Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSN). However, the different architecture of this codec affects the efficiency of transmission protocols and in order to efficient transmission of DVC over WMSN, it is necessary to evaluate the performance of the transmission protocols in the presence of DVC characteristics. In the view of these protocols, error control methods are important mechanisms that provide quality of service and robust multimedia communications. For this reason, we performed a comparative performance analysis for all error control schemes that consist of Automatic Repeat Request (ARQ), Forward Error Correction (FEC), Erasure Coding (EC), hybrid link layer ARQ/FEC and multi-layer hybrid error control schemes for DVC in WMSNs. These analyses are in the terms of the most importance metrics in multimedia communications over WSNs, such as objective and subjective video quality criteria, delay, energy consumption and some DVC-specific metrics. The results show the distinct behavior of DVC in the presence of channel error and can be used to propose an effective and efficient error control scheme for DVC over WMSN. Keywords Distributed video coding . Error control . Wireless multimedia sensor networks Multimed Tools Appl https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-017-5397-z * Ali Bohlooli Bohlooli@eng.ui.ac.ir Mortaza Nikzad mrtz_azad@eng.ui.ac.ir Kamal Jamshidi Jamshidi@eng.ui.ac.ir 1 Faculty of Computer Engineering, University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran