Unequal protection of encoded video streams in bluetooth EDR

Bluetooth’s Enhanced Data Rate (EDR) modulation schemes can potentially support higher quality video streams. To avoid the impact of RF noise, this paper proposes adaptive modulation, previously unavailable to Bluetooth, based on content type importance at the picture and macroblock levels. Because, as a result, a lower bit rate for protected data may occur, buffer management is introduced to avoid transmit buffer overflow. The paper also proposes a tri-zone buffer with varying unequal protection (UP) policy in each zone. Application of these UP techniques results in up to 4 dB improvement in PSNR.