Adaptive rateless coding for data-partitioned video streaming over a broadband wireless channel

Fixed-rate, rateless channel coding is attractive for its linear decoder computational complexity. Though fixed rate coding is appropriate for broadcast systems, this paper proposes adaptive coding for unicast, data-partitioned compressed video streams. The paper finds that the main gain from such a scheme is an increase in goodput and wireless channel utilization, which is important for a real-time service. In fact, in an ideal scheme no retransmissions are needed to repair packets corrupted by channel errors. Video quality is also potentially enhanced by the differential packet drop rates at buffers that result in less important data-partition bearing packets dropped more frequently.