A new unequal error protection scheme for the wireless multimedia transmissions

Due to the fruitful and diversified contents of multimedia traffic and the vulnerable environment of wireless communications, applying unequal error protection (UEP) is now an active research topic. In this paper, we propose a novel error rate weighted transmission scheme that combines both the Trellis Coded Modulation (TCM) and the Non-uniform QAM schemes for transmitting H.264/AVC video data. Based on the non-uniformly distributed property of the importance of intracoded (I-frame) and the predictive coded frame (p-frame), we have found a suitable approach for the non-uniform QAM signal constellation. Simulation results show that our proposed UEP scheme is able to significantly improve the average peak signal-to-noise ratio (Average PSNR).