Mobile TV using scalable video coding and layer-aware forward error correction

A new approach to error protection for scalable media is presented for mobile TV applications. Mobile TV is typically characterized by a number of receiver capabilities and connection qualities. A broadcast service should preferably work for multiple receiver capabilities without the need for downscaling or transcoding at the battery-powered mobile devices. Moreover, a media quality that gracefully degrades with reception quality instead of a complete signal loss is also a desirable feature. The scalable video coding (SVC) extension of H.264/AVC offers an efficient way to support the aforementioned features. In mobile broadcast channels forward error correction (FEC) is used to overcome packet losses. This work proposes a layer-aware forward error correction (L-FEC) approach in combination with SVC. L-FEC increases robustness of the more important layers by generating protection across layers. L-FEC is integrated as an extension of an Raptor FEC implementation. It is shown by experimental results that L-FEC outperforms traditional FEC and UEP protection schemes.