Joint media-channel aware unequal error protection for wireless scalable video streaming

In this paper, we propose a joint source-channel unequal error protection scheme for scalable video streaming over capacity constrained high speed packet access (HSPA) networks. Conventional link adaptation schemes in HSPA networks use the modulation and coding scheme (MCS) that achieves a preset channel frame error rate. Our scheme utilizes video priority information along with channel quality information to set the channel coding rate that maximizes the cumulative coding rate of channel coding and application layer unequal error protection. Performance evaluations show that that under the same constraints our scheme results in an average performance improvement of 0.5dB in video PSNR for different channel conditions and different video sequences.