Method for Unequal Error Protection in DVB-H for Mobile Television

This paper introduces a method for unequal error protection (UEP) of media data in a time-sliced DVB-H channel. Media datagrams are assigned priorities using some a-priori knowledge. Datagrams covering a certain period of playback time are first grouped based on the priority assignment. Each group is then protected using Reed-Solomon forward error correction (FEC) codes and packed into multi-protocol encapsulation (MPE) FEC frames as defined by the DVB-H standard. All MPE-FEC frames for a certain period of playback time are then sent back to back without any delay between these MPE-FEC frames. This method of UEP is generic and can be tuned according to the priority assignment algorithm. Simulations using H.264/AVC video were conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. It used a simple priority assignment algorithm. The resulting rate distortion graphs show good performance and an average luma peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) improvement of up to 0.8 dB was achieved