Rateless Codes with Progressive Recovery for Layered Multimedia Delivery

TL;DR

This paper introduces Progressive Rateless Codes (PRC), a novel layered multimedia delivery method that uses unequal error protection and parallel encoding to enable efficient, progressive recovery of layered data with lower overhead.

Contribution

The paper presents a new PRC approach that improves layered multimedia delivery by providing better recovery performance and lower overhead through unequal error protection and natural layer dependency consideration.

Findings

PRC achieves better recovery performance than existing UEP methods.

PRC has lower overhead in both theoretical analysis and numerical simulations.

PRC enables progressive recovery of layered multimedia streams.

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel approach, based on unequal error protection, to enhance rateless codes with progressive recovery for layered multimedia delivery. With a parallel encoding structure, the proposed Progressive Rateless codes (PRC) assign unequal redundancy to each layer in accordance with their importance. Each output symbol contains information from all layers, and thus the stream layers can be recovered progressively at the expected received ratios of output symbols. Furthermore, the dependency between layers is naturally considered. The performance of the PRC is evaluated and compared with some related UEP approaches. Results show that our PRC approach provides better recovery performance with lower overhead both theoretically and numerically.