Adaptive unequal error protection to enhance multicast live video streaming

Unequal Error Protection (UEP) is an effective method to protect the video against packet losses over wireless packet erasure networks where the exact packet loss rate is hard to predict. A number of UEP schemes based on Rateless code have been proposed for video streaming. However, these schemes employ static UEP settings which do not adapt with the time varying packet loss rate of the channel. This paper proposes an adaptive UEP scheme for live multicast video streaming. The proposed scheme adapts the number of priority classes in the video stream and their protection levels dynamically according o the packet loss rates of all receivers in the multicast session. It also presents a heuristic based algorithm to adapt the UEP settings with changing packet loss rate. We conduct simulations by applying our proposed adaptive UEP scheme on H.264/SVC encoded video bit stream and show that adaptive UEP settings bring significant improvements in terms of average PSNR over a previously studied static UEP scheme for same used bandwidth.