Dependency-Aware Unequal Erasure Protection Codes

Classical unequal erasure protection schemes split the data to be protected into classes which are encoded independently. The unequal protection scheme presented in this document is based on an erasure code which encodes all the data together according to the existing dependencies. A simple algorithm generates dynamically the generator matrix of the erasure code according to the structure of the streams of packets, i.e. the dependencies between the packets, and the rate of the code. This proposed erasure code was applied to a packetized MPEG4 stream transmitted over a packet erasure channel and compared with classical other protection schemes in term of PSNR and MOS. It is shown that the proposed code allows keeping a high video quality-level in a larger packet loss rate range than the other protection schemes.