A new unequal error protection technique for scalable video transmission over multimedia wireless networks

Efficient transmission of multimedia has become a crucial task in next generation cellular wireless and internet protocol (IP) network. Transmission of video at various rates is now a common interest. In various video applications some source symbols are considered to be more important and must be received prior to rest. A packet loss from the important symbols is not encouraged. Recently application layer (AL) forward error correction codes (FEC) which can provide unequal error protection (UEP) has been used for video transmission over wireless channels. Luby transform (LT) codes are the most commonly used AL FEC. A new design of LT codes has been proposed where the predominant symbols are randomly selected based on probability values thereby making it more suitable for UEP. The proposed method maintains the sparsity of G-Matrix but the distribution of predominant bit stream is skewed with respect to the less predominant bit stream. Simulation of H.264/SVC standard shows that the proposed method requires only a smaller transmission overhead and redundancy to achieve high video quality.