Joint unequal loss protection and LT coding for layer-coded media delivery

Rateless codes such as LT codes have become more and more popular due to their abilities to handle varying channel conditions without much feedback. However, rateless codes have the drawback of unable to provide intermediate outputs when delivering layer-coded media content. Although some methods have been proposed to produce intermediate outputs based on adjusting the distribution of LT codes, they are typically content-dependent and unable to guarantee that a more important layer can always be decoded before the decoding of a less important layer. In this paper, we propose a simple joint unequal loss protection (ULP) and LT coding (ULP-LT) scheme for layered media delivery, where different numbers of FEC are allocated to different layers to guarantee the priority and LT codes are used to deal with varying channel conditions. Simulation results show that with a small amount of overhead allocated to ULP, the ULP-LT scheme can produce good intermediate performance while still enjoying the nice features provided by LT codes.