Efficient partitioning of unequal error protected MPEG video streams for multiple channel transmission

Reliable transmission of video over wireless networks must address the limited bandwidth and the possibility of loss. When the bandwidth is insufficient on a single channel, the video can be partitioned over multiple channels with possibly unequal characteristics at the expense of more complex channel coding (error correction). This paper addresses the problem of efficiently partitioning forward error protected, pre-encoded video data for transmission over multiple channels. The assumption of pre-encoding precludes adjustment of source rates to the channels, since it is assumed that channel characteristics are not known until immediately prior to the start of transmission. The proposed partitioning exploits the structure of MPEG video, and frames in each group-of-picture are reordered based on their decoding dependence. To be spectrally efficient, the frames of different types are unequally error protected taking different channel reliabilities into account. A pruned tree search algorithm is implemented to efficiently solve the problem. Simulation results are presented.