Novel R-D optimized uneven erasure-protection strategy for scalable data formed of multiple code streams

This paper presents a novel uneven erasure-protection (UEP) strategy for scalable data formed by interleaving independently decodable and scalable sub-streams. The main differences between UEP and the proposed novel strategy are: 1) the placement of separate sub-streams in separate packets to establish independence and 2) the use of permuted systematic Reed-Solomon (RS) codes to enhance the distribution of message symbols amongst the packets. To maximize the performance of this transmission scheme, we optimize the erasure protection assignment in a rate-distortion sense. Our experiments demonstrate the net superiority of the new UEP strategy over the traditional UEP for moderate numbers of packets (up to 42). Peak performance improvements (0.3-0.7 dB) occur between 4-10 packets for various transmission rates and packet erasure rates.