H.264/AVC video packet aggregation and unequal error protection for noisy channels

The quality of H.264/AVC compressed video delivery over wireless channels is affected by packet losses. Aggregating H.264/AVC slices to form video packets with sizes adaptive to their importance can improve transmission reliability. Larger packets are more likely to be in error but smaller packets cause more overhead. A second method is assigning stronger channel code rates to more important slices. We use cross-layer dynamic programming to address both adaptive packet formation as well as RCPC-channel code rate allocation simultaneously, to improve received video quality. Simulation results show the advantages of the proposed scheme.