Lightweight multimedia packet prioritization model for unequal error protection

In this paper, we analyze the effect of packet losses in multimedia sequences and propose a priority model for the packets, where the highest priorities are given to the packets whose loss has stronger effect in the perceived Quality of Experience (QoE). The proposed model assigns priorities to each of the media packets based on the audiovisual coding structure: type of frame, position of the packet within the frame and position of the frame within the GOP. This model can be used as a basis for Unequal Error Protection (UEP) strategies where, from a window of consecutive packets, only a fraction of them are protected and the others may potentially get lost. The experiments conducted show that this strategy strongly reduces the Mean Square Error (MSE) of the received sequence compared to the situation where the same ratio of packet losses is produced randomly. The strategy provides a good MSE gain even when the bit budget assigned to encode the priority of each packet is small. The prioritization model and the priority label signalization are fully compatible with current standards for multimedia distribution, and therefore they can be immediately applied to existing multimedia delivery services, such as IPTV platforms.