A survey on hierarchical modulation for high-definition video transmission based on IEEE 802.11n

In this paper, a hierarchical modulation scheme is applied to IEEE 802.11n to reach the purpose of unequal error protection (UEP). A simplified method of data partition is proposed for intra- and inter-predicted videos which are encoded by H.264/AVC. Simulation results show that the PSNR of compressed video can be improved through this hierarchical modulation scheme by about 4 ~ 8 dB on both AWGN and wireless fading channel. However, this improvement can only be achieved in a quite small range of low SNR, which greatly restricts its application in a practical system.