Turbo-detected unequal protection MPEG-4 wireless video telephony using multi-level coding, trellis coded modulation and space-time trellis coding

Most multimedia source signals are capable of tolerating lossy, rather than lossless delivery to the human eye, ear and other human sensors. The corresponding lossy and preferably low-delay multimedia source codecs however exhibit unequal error sensitivity, which is not the case for Shannon's ideal entropy codec. This paper proposes a jointly optimised turbo transceiver design capable of providing unequal error protection for MPEG-4 coding aided wireless video telephony. The transceiver investigated consists of space-time trellis coding (STTC) invoked for the sake of mitigating the effects of fading, in addition to bandwidth efficient trellis coded modulation or bit-interleaved coded modulation, combined with a multi-level coding scheme employing either two different-rate non-systematic convolutional codes (NSCs) or two recursive systematic convolutional codes for yielding a twin-class unequal-protection. A single-class protection based benchmark scheme combining STTC and NSC is used for comparison with the unequal-protection scheme advocated. The video performance of the various schemes is evaluated when communicating over uncorrelated Rayleigh fading channels. It was found that the proposed scheme requires about 2.8 dBs lower transmit power than the benchmark scheme in the context of the MPEG-4 videophone transceiver at a similar decoding complexity.