Grouped unequal loss protection for scalable media transmission

The number of packets contained in a single ULP framework is upper-bounded by the Galois field of RS code. When the number of available channel packets is beyond this limit, we propose to divide these packets into several groups and protect each group using a minor- modified ULP algorithm. We present two grouped ULP schemes: GULP-S-I and GULP-I-I. GULP-S-I splits the source scalable bitstream into several slices and protect each slice into a separate group, while GULP-I-I puts the consecutive source bytes of the bitstream alternately into different groups. While transmitting, a packet interleaving technique is used. Experimental results show that both schemes can achieve very good average PSNR performance, and GULP-I-I also has good progressive transmission performance.