Joint Power Control and FEC Unequal Error Protection for Scalable H.264 Video Transmission over Wireless Fading Channels

H.264/AVC scalable video coding (SVC) is an upto-date video compression standard. This paper deals with the issue of transmitting H.264 scalable video bitstreams over wireless fading channels. The contribution is twofold: Firstly, to exploit the importance of prioritized video packets in different temporal layer, quality layer and group of pictures (GOP), a simple and accurate performance metric, namely, layer-GOP-weighted expected zone of error propagation (LGW-EZEP) model is proposed. Secondly, a joint power control and forward error correction (FEC) unequal error protection (UEP) scheme is proposed to transmit the video streams over orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems efficiently and robustly. Meanwhile, a new iterative algorithm is given to solve the joint optimization problem. Compared to other independent power control or FEC UEP schemes, the combined protecting scheme demonstrates stronger robustness and flexibility via various fading channels.