Unequal Error Protection for H.263+ bitstreams over a wireless IP network

This paper presents an original solution to efficiently transmit video bitstreams over an IP networked wireless channel via an unequal rate allocation protection scheme. The originality of this scheme is that it proposes a sensitivity estimation not only for the video stream itself as classically done, but also for the network headers used over the IP wireless network, here considered in their compressed version. Based on this sensitivity measure, the protection allocation algorithm is able to propose an efficient unequal rate allocation scheme using rate compatible punctured codes. Numerical results obtained in the case of H.263+ bitstreams transmitted over an error prone wireless compressed RTP/UDP/IP network show that taking into account both video and headers sensitivity allows this unequal error protection (UEP) scheme to provide PSNR improvements of about 5 dB when compared to equal error protection (EEP) scheme with a low additional complexity