Optimal Multiplexed Hierarchical Modulation for Unequal Error Protection of Progressive Bit Streams

Progressive image and scalable video have gradual differences of importance in their bitstreams, which can benefit from multiple levels of unequal error protection (UEP). Though hierarchical modulation has been intensively studied as an UEP approach for digital broadcasting and multimedia transmission, methods of achieving a large number of UEP levels have rarely been studied. In this paper, we propose a multilevel UEP system using multiplexed hierarchical quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) for progressive transmission over mobile radio channels. We suggest a specific way of multiplexing, and prove that multiple levels of UEP are achieved by the suggested method. When the BER is dominated by the minimum Euclidian distance, we derive an optimal multiplexing approach which minimizes both the average and peak powers. An asymmetric hierarchical QAM which reduces the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) without performance loss is also proposed. Numerical results show that the performance of progressive transmission over Rayleigh fading channels is significantly enhanced by the proposed UEP systems.