Scalable broadcasting of sliced H.264/AVC over DVB-H network

Video broadcasting to heterogeneous receivers with varying channel conditions poses many challenges. The nature of the real-time data usually precludes any retransmission option. Forward error correction (FEC) can be used to protect the video data at the cost of adding some redundancy. The gains are increased further by partitioning the video data according to its importance for video reconstruction and adding the redundancy in proportion to the importance. Application Layer Forward Error Correction (AL-FEC) can be applied using rateless codes, which can potentially generate an unlimited number of packets on the fly from the source packets. Expanding Window Random Linear Codes (EW RLC) are a simple unequal error protection fountain coding scheme which can adapt to the prioritized data transmission. In this study we propose EW RLC for DVB-H broadcasting using H.264/Advanced video coding (AVC) slice partitioned data. The results show that EW RLC can be used to protect the slice-partitioned video data for multimedia broadcast applications to suit different data rates and channel conditions.