Unequal Error Protection Based on DVFS for JSCD in Low-Power Portable Multimedia Systems

This article presents a low-power decoder design for joint source-channel decoding (JSCD) based on a novel unequal error protection (UEP) scheme over additive white gaussian noise (AWGN) channels. Conventional JSCD schemes, adopting low-density parity check (LDPC) codes for multimedia devices, typically operate at a fixed-time decoding loop, regardless of the quality of data received. We present a JSCD scheme that achieves reduction in power through minimum energy decoding and dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS). Consequently, up to 39% power reduction is achieved in Foreman, Akiyo, and Mobile video streams without performance degradation in reconstructed video quality.