The wireless channel is time-varying where burst packet losses often occur during the fading or lossy handovers. In order to avoid unaccepted quality degradation of video streaming over 3G cellular networks, we propose and analyze a client-driven scalable cross-layer (CSC) retransmission scheme. Considering the perceptual importance of different video partitions under the real-time and bandwidth constraints, the proposed scheme uses the radio link-layer retransmission with priority to adapt conventional packet losses in wireless channels; furthermore, it uses the adaptive transport-layer retransmission to provide end-to-end quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees over cellular networks. The simulation experiments show that the proposed scheme can effectively improve the perceptual quality of 3G video streaming as compared to the traditional deadline-based scheme without the prioritized link-layer retransmission.