A reliable video communication system is proposed based on data partitioning feature of H.264/AVC, used to create a layered stream, and LT codes for erasure protection. The proposed scheme termed rate adaptive selective segment assignment (RASSA) is an adaptive low-complexity solution to varying channel conditions. The comparison of the results of the proposed scheme is also provided for slice-partitioned H.264/AVC data. Simulation results show competitiveness of the proposed scheme compared to optimized unequal and equal error protection solutions. The simulation results also demonstrate that a high visual quality video transmission can be maintained despite the adverse effect of varying channel conditions and the number of decoding failures can be reduced. 1. Introduction Reliable real-time wireless video communication is gaining increased importance as novel richer multimedia applications are being deployed. Since wireless channels are prone to errors, it is necessary to provide strong error control mechanisms. Forward Error Correction (FEC) coding is preferable option as retransmission in real-time wireless applications is usually not a viable solution. On the other hand, error resilience video coding schemes generally come at a cost of decreased video performance in error-free environments and increased video coding complexity. To combat packet drops, Digital Fountain erasure protection codes [1] are proven effective solution. Fountain codes [2, 3] are a recent class of FEC codes originally proposed for multicast/broadcast applications to combat losses of packets in the network. Fountain codes are rateless and in non-time-constraint applications can generate as many encoded packets as needed. The amount of additional packets transmitted is the redundancy that is necessary for decoding to succeed and can be adjusted to combat different channel conditions. In bandwidth-limited wireless networks it is important to keep the introduced redundancy to a minimum. Thus, instead of targeting the worst possible channel conditions, the redundancy should be adaptively adjusted according to the varying channel conditions via dynamic source-channel coding. LT codes [2] are the first proposed class of practical fountain codes. Although Raptor codes [3] generally provide better performance, the LT codes are used in this paper due to their design and implementation simplicity. Note, however, that LT codes have a higher decoding complexity of per source message (where is the message length) than Raptor codes, . H.264 Advanced Video Coding (AVC) [4] is the
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