A novel approach to achieve unequal error protection for video transmission over 3G wireless networks

In this paper, we present a novel unequal error protection technique that enhances the video transmission quality over wireless networks. The case of application considered is a UMTS/TDD transmission system for H263 compressed and turbo-coded video sequences. The overall redundancy added to the compressed stream is non-uniformly distributed between the succeeding video frames in order to minimize the mean distortion over the transmitted sequence. The repartition of the redundancy on the video stream is optimized using an analytical approach which aims to alleviate the error propagation along the sequence. Different puncturing patterns of the rate 1/3 turbo-coder were considered in our simulations. The results obtained here are compared to those with a classical equal error protection scheme. We demonstrate that the gain in the system performances can reach 1.5 dB (in terms of the mean peal, signal-to-noise ratio) without any significant increase in the transmission rate or the receiver complexity. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.