Dependency-aware unequal erasure protection codes

Abstract

Classical unequal erasure protection schemes split data to be protected into classes which are encoded independently. The unequal protection scheme presented in this paper is based on an erasure code which encodes all the data together according to the existing dependencies. A simple algorithm generates dynamically the generator matrix of the erasure code according to the packets streams structure, i.e., the dependencies between the packets, and the rate of the code. This proposed erasure code was applied to a packetized MPEG4 stream transmitted over a packet erasure channel and compared with other classical protection schemes in terms of PSNR and MOS. It is shown that the proposed code allows keeping a high video quality-level in a larger packet loss rate range than the other protection schemes.