Unequal error protection for data partitioned H.264/AVC video broadcasting

Application Layer Forward Error Correction (AL-FEC) is becoming a popular addition to protocols for real-time video delivery over IP-based wireless networks. In particular, rateless codes are identified as suitable solution for AL-FEC due to their flexibility and capacity-approaching performance. Since each part of video data is not equally important for video reconstruction, it is beneficial to group it based on its importance, and then provide different degree of protection using Unequal Error Protection (UEP). Data partitioning (DP) is one such low-cost feature in H.264/AVC enabling partitioning of video data based on its importance. We propose schemes for the DP H.264/AVC video transmission using Raptor and Random Linear Codes (RLC) and investigate their performance as AL-FEC solutions in Digital Video Broadcasting. We provide comparisons between optimized Non-Overlapping Window RLC and Expanding Window (EW) RLC, which are two effective UEP RLC strategies. The results using realistic channel traces show viability of the EW RLC as a promising solution for multimedia broadcast applications.