Physical layer based error resilient H.264/AVC coded video over wireless networks

Abstract

This paper investigates the capabilities of Hierarchical Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (HQAM) to provide Unequal Error Protection (UEP) to H.264/AVC encoded video bitstream. The UEP is based on the asymmetrical error sensitivity of the coded bitstream and exploits data partitioning mode of H.264/AVC to provide protection to their sensitivity to channel errors. The more important bits called High Priority (HP) bits and less important bits called Low Priority (LP) bits are mapped to asymmetrical constellation of 16-HQAM such that HP bits are protected more than LP bits. The AWGN (Additive White Gaussian Noise) channel is exploited to evaluate the performance of the proposed system. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme provides noticeable improvement at poor channel conditions.