Transmission of multiple description codes over wireless channels using channel balancing

Multiple description coding (MDC) is an error-resilient scheme for transmission over packet erasure channels. In this paper, we propose a channel-balancing scheme for the transmission of an MDC source over time-varying channels, such as wireless links. We consider a system in which there are more subchannels than the number of descriptions and the transmission rate is adapted to the channel variation. The proposed balancing scheme is based on the polynomial-time set-partitioning algorithm using the differencing method. It is shown that the proposed scheme results in a low-delay and high-throughput transmission, which is desirable for real-time multimedia content delivery over wireless channels.