Joint Source-Channel-Authentication Resource Allocation and Unequal Authenticity Protection for Multimedia Over Wireless Networks

There have been increasing concerns about the security issues of wireless transmission of multimedia in recent years. Wireless networks, by their nature, are more vulnerable to external intrusions than wired ones. Many applications demand authenticating the integrity of multimedia content delivered wirelessly. In this work, we describe a framework for jointly coding and authenticating multimedia to be delivered over heterogeneous wireless networks. We firstly introduce a novel concept called unequal authenticity protection (UAP), which unequally allocate resources to achieve an optimal authentication result. We then consider integrating UAP with specific source and channel-coding models, to obtain optimal end-to-end quality by the means of joint source-channel-authentication analysis. Lastly, we present an implementation of the proposed joint coding and authentication system on a progressive JPEG coder. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach is indeed able to achieve the desired authentication of multimedia over wireless networks