Scalable video multicast using expanding window fountain codes

  • Authors:

  • Dejan Vukobratovic;Vladimir Stankovic;Dino Sejdinovic;Lina Stankovic;Zixiang Xiong

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Power, Electronics and Communication Engineering, University of Novi Sad, Novi Sad, Serbia and Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow ...;Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK;Centre for Communications Research, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK;Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK;Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Multimedia - Special issue on quality-driven cross-layer design for multimedia communications
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Fountain codes were introduced as an efficient and universal forward error correction (FEC) solution for data multicast over lossy packet networks. They have recently been proposed for large scale multimedia content delivery in practical multimedia distribution systems. However, standard fountain codes, such as LT or Raptor codes, are not designed to meet unequal error protection (UEP) requirements typical in real-time scalable video multicast applications. In this paper, we propose recently introduced UEP expanding window fountain (EWF) codes as a flexible and efficient solution for real-time scalable video multicast. We demonstrate that the design flexibility and UEP performance make EWF codes ideally suited for this scenario, i.e., EWF codes offer a number of design parameters to be "tuned" at the server side to meet the different reception criteria of heterogeneous receivers. The performance analysis using both analytical results and simulation experiments of H.264 scalable video coding (SVC) multicast to heterogeneous receiver classes confirms the flexibility and efficiency of the proposed EWF-based FEC solution.