An unequal error protection using Reed-Solomon codes for real-time MPEG video stream

Real-time MPEG video stream over a packet switching network is very sensitive to losses and errors. In the same way as the priority encoding transmission (PET) scheme, our purpose is to protect the different contents of the MPEG video stream according to their importance for video sample quality played out at the receiver side. However, our approach considers as very important the latency delay for interactive applications. So we determine an upper bound for the processing time of Reed-Solomon erasure codes. Considering as criteria the ratio between the network bandwidth and the picture quality, the optimal application policy for unequal error protection is highlighted by experimental results.