A Layer-Mixed FEC Scheme for Scalable Media Transmission Over Mobile TV Services

This paper proposes a novel method for layered media transmission in mobile broadcast systems, which is referred to as the layer-mixed forward error correction (FEC). Unlike the existing unequal error protection and layer-aware FEC which decode each layer symbols with a probability, the new approach is capable of decoding each layer data deterministically as long as enough symbols are received corresponding to the specific layer. The lower layer is always decoded prior to upper layers, which facilitates the delivery of scalable media stream, especially in mobile TV services with heterogeneous networks and terminals. In order to evaluate the performance fairly, this paper compares the minimum channel capacity required by several FEC schemes. The experimental results show that the new approach outperforms the existing schemes in severely degraded channel situations.