Globally Optimal Uneven Erasure-Protected Multi-Group Packetization of Scalable Codes

We study the problem of rate-distortion optimal packetization with uneven erasure protection (UEP) of scalable source sequence, into multiple groups of packets. The grouping of packets is needed when the length of the channel code, hence the number of packets, has to be modest for low decoding complexity. The problem was previously addressed in the literature but only locally optimal solution was proposed. We develop an algorithm for globally optimal solution and show that it has the same complexity as optimal UEP packetization into a single group of packets, i.e., quadratic in transmission budget