Physical layer unequal error protection of wavelet coded video using Hierarchical QAM

Unequal Error protection (UEP) of wavelet coded video is investigated using Hierarchical Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (HQAM). Based on the unequal sensitivity of coded bit stream against transmission errors, this paper investigates the properties of HQAM constellation to provide different degree of error protection to the coded bits having different degree of importance. This paper proposes an UEP scheme, performed at the physical layer using HQAM to protect higher priority (more sensitive) bits strongly without any additional bandwidth, but at the cost of increased errors in the lower priority (less sensitive) bits. The performance of the transmission system is evaluated under the Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN). Simulation results verify the improvements in the performance.