Explicit Network-Adaptive Robust Multiple Description Coding

Abstract

The data delivery performance of multiple description coding (MDC) over unreliable network with capacity constraints is always related with three factors: redundancy rate, packet loss rate (PLR), bit error rate (BER). It is supposed that the packet losses have been settled by MDC with certain redundancy. We simplified the network-adaptive data delivery problem to only relating with the redundancy rate factor, because the bit-error resilience of the system can be self-adaptively guaranteed well enough for any redundancy case by the proposed codeword ordering method. Then the problem becomes explicit, and is easily and precisely solved by the proposed iterative redundancy control method. The proposed scheme is an extension of scalar quantization (SQ) based MDC, either balanced or unbalanced case. The related index assignment (IA) problem is well solved, and the R-D bound is proved trending to be optimal. This method can be incorporated into any SQ-based MDC system to simplify the network-adaptive delivery problem, fully considering the related factors.