Multiple Description Coding (MDC) is a technique used to obtain two or more (often correlated) descriptions of a source, which are transmitted over different channels to the receiver. These descriptions of the source support two levels of reconstruction quality. When all the descriptions are received and used in the reconstruction, the source can be reconstructed with high fidelity. When only a...

Multiple description codes address the problem of unreliable channels by means of independent descriptions, while layered codes address the problems of heterogeneous client bandwidths and dynamic network congestion by means of sequences of layers. With the goal of achieving both robustness to unreliable channels and adaptivity to client bandwidth heterogeneity and network congestion, we explore...