A novel unequal loss protection approach for scalable video streaming over wireless networks

This paper presents an adaptive unequal loss protection (ULP) scheme for robust transmission of scalable video streaming over wireless networks. By jointly exploiting the temporal dependency between frames in a group of pictures (GOP) and the quality dependency between the scalable layers in each frame, the proposed scheme adoptively assigns unequal amount of forward error correction (FEC) codes across packets to each layer and adjusts the sending rate by dynamically selecting the number of layers to transmit, according to the available network bandwidth and the packet loss rate. To prevent the video transmission error propagation, an algorithm is developed to achieve efficient FEC assignment for the base layers in a GOP in the sense of minimizing the decoder distortion. The simulation results show that the proposed adaptive ULP scheme can provide better video quality under varying network conditions and can achieve more graceful degradation as packet loss increasing and available bandwidth decreasing.