Dynamic bit-interleaved turbo-coded modulation for unequal error protection

A dynamic bit-interleaved turbo-coded modulation scheme is described, which may be advantageously used to apply unequal error protection (UEP) to coded sources with unequally distributed bit error sensitivity. Experimental results on Rayleigh channels prove the proposed scheme to provide very good performance for different spectral efficiency values, while ensuring sharp transitions when switching between different protection levels. As a possible application, the proposed scheme may be adopted to implement UEP for the transmission of MPEG-4 video over wireless channels.