Optimization of Unequal Error Protection Rateless Codes for Multimedia Multicasting

TL;DR

This paper presents an optimized rateless coding scheme for multimedia multicasting that provides unequal error protection tailored to heterogeneous users, ensuring either guaranteed or best-effort QoS with improved performance.

Contribution

It introduces a novel optimized random interleaved rateless coder for UEP in multimedia multicasting, transforming QoS guarantees into a convex optimization problem for global optimality.

Findings

The proposed coder outperforms recent UEP rateless codes in simulations.

Guaranteed QoS optimization is achieved through convex programming.

The scheme effectively adapts to heterogeneous user requirements.

Abstract

Rateless codes have been shown to be able to provide greater flexibility and efficiency than fixed-rate codes for multicast applications. In the following, we optimize rateless codes for unequal error protection (UEP) for multimedia multicasting to a set of heterogeneous users. The proposed designs have the objectives of providing either guaranteed or best-effort quality of service (QoS). A randomly interleaved rateless encoder is proposed whereby users only need to decode symbols up to their own QoS level. The proposed coder is optimized based on measured transmission properties of standardized raptor codes over wireless channels. It is shown that a guaranteed QoS problem formulation can be transformed into a convex optimization problem, yielding a globally optimal solution. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed optimized random interleaved UEP rateless coder's performance compares favorably with that of other recently proposed UEP rateless codes.