Multiple description coding with delta-sigma modulation

Multiple description coding (MDC) can be applied for multipath communication to reduce the negative affect of packet loss, and it is composed of three processes: encoding, quantizing, and decoding. Encoding and decoding are well researched in MDC, but there are few researches that focus on the quantization process. Therefore, this paper focuses on the quantization process of MDC. The aim of this paper is to improve the quality of the received data, and to reduce the bit width by employing static quantization (uniform quantization) with dynamic quantizer (ΔΣ modulation). Performance evaluation was done using a block diagram input module XCos which is attached to the formula processing software Scilab. As a result of using the ΔΣ modulation, the distortion improved by 95.2% when both of the descriptions were received, and 45.3% when only one of the description was received. Also, the experimental result showed that the quantization bit width can be reduced from 8 bit to 6 bit when the ΔΣ modulation was used.