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.