Soft decision unequal error protection scheme for MPEG advanced audio coding

In this paper, a system using soft decision decoding of convolutional codes is investigated for MPEG-4 advanced audio coding. Under severe channel random bit error rates of 4.00x10^-2 and above, the proposed scheme is able to achieve above 90% improvement in residual bit error rate performance over the current scheme. The average percentage overhead incurred using the proposed scheme is about 21%, which is the same as that of the original UEP scheme. An analysis with the theoretical bounds shows that within experimental error, the proposed scheme can perform to near optimum as compared to the current scheme.