A Proposed Fountain Unequal Erasure Protection Scheme for MPEG Transport Streams over IP

The real-time transport of multi-media over IP faces issues, such as packet drops and jitter, that might generate severe impairments in the content being decoded at the reception. Channel coding is the most effective measure for overcoming these issues, since the latency imposed by retransmission protocols is not desirable. There are channel coding schemes specified in recommendations and standards, widely adopted by equipment vendors today. Among these, Fountain Codes present attractive characteristics for such applications. This article proposes an unequal protection scheme for Transport Streams over RTP/UDP/IP employing Fountain codes and presents comparative results of simulations performed with these and other channel coding schemes commonly adopted today.