Unequal error protection for wireless multimedia transmission in decode-and-forward relay networks

In this paper, we propose an unequal error protection (UEP) scheme for multimedia transmission over wireless decode-and-forward (DF) relay networks. We prove that relay selection combining (R-SC) mode yields a better error rate performance than all-participate relays, i.e., distributed space-time codes (DSTC) and orthogonal transmission with maximum ratio combining (OT-MRC) at the destination. Hence, we apply the R-SC scheme for transmitting bit sequence with high priority while the cooperative spatial multiplexing scheme is employed for the bit-stream with low priority. With this strategy, we achieve the maximum spatial diversity gain for high priority data and a high spatial multiplexing gain for low priority data. Monte-Carlo simulations and analytical results are shown to validate the proposed UEP scheme.