Unequal error protection rateless coding design for multimedia multicasting

We study the design and optimization of unequal error protection (UEP) rateless codes for scalable multimedia multicasting. We formulate two general problems of optimizing UEP rateless code for multimedia multicasting to heterogenous users: one focusing on providing guaranteed quality of service (QoS) and the other focusing on providing best-effort QoS. A random interleaved rateless encoder design is proposed. Unlike previous designs, existing standardized raptor codes can be directly applied to this design without degrading performance. For each problem, optimal layer selection parameters are obtained either analytically or numerically. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed optimized random interleaved UEP rateless code outperforms non-optimized rateless codes and recently proposed UEP rateless codes.