Optimal packetization of embedded bitstreams

Summary form only given. To achieve error resilience, digital communication systems typically partition a data file into blocks of samples in the time domain which represent small cohesive segments of the input source, be it image, video or audio. We consider the problem of packing a set of embedded bitstreams B/sub k/ into M packets of payload L. Optimal packetization is to select ML bits to fill in M packets while satisfying certain alignment constraints that are imposed by error resilience designs, and at the same time minimizing the distortion. Just as source and channel coding have conflicting objectives of removing and adding redundancy, error resilience via packetization will somewhat reduce the rate distortion performance of the compression code when the transmission is error free. Our goal is to minimize such losses of coding efficiency.