Unequal error protection for wireless transmission of MPEG audio

A new unequal error protection scheme for enhancing the quality of the wireless transmitted MPEG audio is introduced. The scheme is divided into two parts. The first part, namely the unequal frame protection, puts more protection on the header portion of the MPEG frame and less protection on the data sample portion of the MPEG frame. The second scheme, namely the unequal sample protection, put more protection on the most significant bits (MSBs) of the quantized data samples and less protection on the least significant bits (LSBs). Simulation results show that when compared to the equal error protection scheme, the proposed scheme reduces the frame error rate by a factor of 2 and lowers the peak-subband-error-power-to-mask ratio of the audio data by as much as 11 dB.