A Novel JSCC Scheme for UEP-Based Scalable Video Transmission Over MIMO Systems

In this paper, we propose a novel joint source-channel coding (JSCC) scheme for scalable video transmission over multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. By exploiting the diversity of MIMO antennas and forward error correction (FEC)-based protection, our method aims to provide unequal error protection (UEP) for the video layers, which are mapped to appropriate antennas. Moreover, JSCC is also considered that we extract a proper subset of video layers and allocate suitable FEC redundancy to them. Jointly considering video layer extraction, FEC rate allocation, and video layer scheduling, we are able to achieve UEP so as to minimize end-to-end distortion. We formulate the scheme as a nonlinear integer optimization problem, which is known to be NP-hard. To find a near-optimal solution efficiently, we propose a low-complexity branch-and-bound algorithm, which partitions the original problem into a series of subproblems by a video layer branching technique. In each branch, the upper and lower distortion bounds are derived. In particular, we transform the video layer scheduling subproblem into a 0/1 multiple knapsack problem, which is NP-complete, and employ an evolutionary Lagrangian method to find a solution efficiently. For the FEC allocation subproblem, a Lagrange duality algorithm with fuzzy surrogate subgradient is proposed. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method has good efficiency while achieving close performance to the optimal results.