Joint source-channel coding for MPEG-4 streams transmission over 3G networks

The aim of the 3rd generation networks is to combine the multimedia services over Internet and provide them on wireless mobile platforms. The stability, interoperability and robustness offered by MPEG-4 (moving picture experts group) make it an ideal solution for mobile networks, and it has been selected by 3GPP (the 3rd generation partnership) and 3GPP2 for 3G phones. Burst and random bit errors introduced by fading channels degrades MPEG-4 streams. Conventional error correcting techniques cannot correct these errors. In this paper, a JSCC (joint source-channel coding) method based on MPEG-4 system and turbo coder has been proposed. The critical important MPEG-4 streams such as the BIFS (binary format for scenes), OD (object descriptors) and IOD (initial object descriptors) streams are transmitted by using TCP (transmission control protocol), and MPEG-4 audio/video ES (elementary streams) are transmitted by using UDP (user datagram protocol) over 3G channels. Transmission UDP packets is adopted UEP (unequal error protection) turbo codes according to MPEG-4 audio/video data partitioning. Simulation results show that this method can effectively improve the performance.