Robust transmission of H.264/AVC video using 64-QAM and unequal error protection

Abstract

This paper presents a robust transmission of H264/AVC coded video using hierarchical quadrature amplitude modulation (HQAM), which takes into consideration the non-uniformly distributed importance of frames in a group of pictures (GOP) intracoded (I-frames) and predictive coded frames (P-frames) as well as the sensitivity of the coded bitsream against transmission errors. Unequal error protection is based on uniform and non-uniform HQAM constellations in conjunction with different scenarios of splitting the bits of transmitted symbol for protection of the more important information of the video content. The performance of the transmission system is evaluated under additive Gaussian noise (AWGN) conditions. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed strategy produces a better quality of the reconstructed video data compared with a system that offers uniform protection.