Internet Engineering Task Force                    M. Nguyen, G. Liebl,
                                                         T. Stockhammer
Internet Draft                                     LNT, Munich Univ. of
                                                             Technology
Document: draft-lnt-avt-uxp-02.txt
September 2000                                              F. Burkert,
                                                     J.Pandel, G. Baese
Expires: March 2001                                  Siemens AG, Munich


An RTP Payload Format for Erasure-Resilient Transmission of Progressive
                           Multimedia Streams


Status of this Memo

   This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with
      all provisions of Section 10 of RFC2026.


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1. Abstract

   This document specifies an efficient way to ensure erasure-resilient
   transmission of progressively encoded multimedia sources via RTP
   using Reed-Solomon codes. The level of erasure protection can be
   explicitly adapted to the importance of the respective parts in the
   source stream, thus allowing a graceful degradation of application
   quality with increasing packet loss rate on the network. Hence, this
   type of unequal erasure protection (UXP) schemes is intended to cope
   with the rapidly varying channel conditions on wireless access links
   to the Internet backbone. Nevertheless, backward compatibility to
   currently standardized non-progressive multimedia codecs is ensured,
   since equal erasure protection (EXP) represents a subset of generic
   UXP. By defining a comparably simple payload format, the proposed
   scheme can be easily integrated into the existing framework for RTP.





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2. Conventions used in this document

   The following terms are used throughout this document:

   1.) Message block: a higher layer transport unit (e.g. an IP
   packet), that enters/leaves the segmentation/reassembly stage at the
   interface to wireless data link layers.

   2.) Segment: denotes a link layer transport unit.

   3.) CRC: Cyclic Redundancy Check, usually added to transport units
   at the sender to detect the existence of erroneous bits in a
   transport unit at the receiver.

   4.) Segmentation/Reassembly Process: If the size of the transport
   units at the link layer is smaller than that at the upper layers,
   message blocks have to be split up into several parts, i.e.
   segments, which are then transmitted subsequently over the link. If
   nothing is lost, the original message block can be restored at the
   receiving entity (reassembly).

   5.) Quality-of-service: application-dependent criterion to define a
   certain desired operation point.

   6.) Codec: denotes a functional pair consisting of a source encoding
   unit at the sender and a corresponding source decoding unit at the
   receiver; usually standardized for different multimedia applications
   like audio or video.

   7.) Progressive source coding: results in a stream of coded data
   whose distinct elements are of different importance to the
   reconstruction process at the decoder. Elements are commonly ordered
   from highest to least importance, where the latter elements depend
   on the previous.

   8.) Reed-Solomon (RS) code: belongs to the class of linear nonbinary
   block codes, and is uniquely specified by the block length n, the
   number of parity symbols t, and the symbol alphabet.

   9.) n: is a variable, which denotes both the block length of a RS
   codeword, and the number of columns in a TB (see 15).

   10.) k: is a variable, which denotes the number of information
   symbols in a RS codeword.

   11.) t: is a variable, which denotes the number of parity symbols in
   a RS codeword.

   12.) Erasure: When a packet is lost during transmission, an erasure
   is said to have happened. Since the position of the erased packet in
   a sequence is usually known, a corresponding erasure marker can be
   set at the receiving entity.

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   13.) Base layer: comprises the first and most important elements in
   a progressively encoded bitstream, without which all subsequent
   information is useless.

   14.) Enhancement layer: comprises one or more sets of the less
   important subsequent elements in a progressively encoded bitstream.
   A specific enhancement layer can be decoded, if and only if the base
   layer and all previous enhancement layer data (of higher importance)
   is available.

   15.) Transmission block (TB): denotes a memory array of L rows and n
   columns. Each row of a TB represents a RS codeword, whereas each
   column represents the payload of an RTP packet.

   16.) L: is a variable, which denotes both the number of rows in a TB
   and the payload length of an RTP packet in bytes.

   17.) Unequal erasure protection (UXP): denotes a specific strategy
   which varies the level of erasure protection across a TB according
   to a given redundancy profile.

   18.) Equal erasure protection (EXP): is a subset of UXP, for which
   the level of erasure protection is kept constant across a TB.

   19.) Redundancy profile: describes the size of the different erasure
   protection classes in a TB, i.e. the number of rows (codewords) per
   class.

   20.) Erasure protection class: contains a set of rows (codewords) of
   the TB with same erasure correction capability.

   21.) i: is a variable, which denotes the number of parity bytes for
   each row in erasure protection class i.

   22.) CA_i: is a variable, which denotes the set of rows contained in
   erasure protection class i.

   23.) A_i: is a variable, which denotes the total number of rows
   contained in erasure protection class i, i.e. the cardinality of
   CA_i.

   24.) T: is a variable, which denotes the number of parity bytes for
   each row in the highest erasure protection class (with respect to
   application data) in a TB.

   25.) AV: denotes the erasure protection vector of length (T+1) used
   to describe a certain redundancy profile.

   26.) DP: descriptor used for in-band signaling of the erasure
   protection vector



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   27.) Stuffing: insertion of predefined symbol patterns. Stuffing is
   performed, if the information part of an erasure protection class
   cannot be filled completely with (application) payload data.

   28.) Interleaver: performs the spreading of a codeword, i.e. a row
   in the TB, over n successive packets, such that the probability of
   an erasure burst in a codeword is kept small.

   29.) UXP header: is the additional header information contained in
   each RTP packet after UXP has been applied.

   30.) X: denotes a currently not used extension field of 1 bit in the
   UXP header.

   31.) P: is a variable which denotes the number of parity symbols per
   row used to protect the inband signaling of the redundancy profile.

   32.) ceil(.): denotes the ceiling function, i.e. rounding up to the
   next integer.


   The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
   "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED",  "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in
   this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC-2119 [].



3. Introduction

   Due to the increasing popularity of high-quality multimedia
   applications over the Internet and the high level of public
   acceptance of existing mobile communication systems, there is a
   strong demand for a future combination of these two techniques: One
   possible scenario consists of an integrated communication
   environment, where users can set up multimedia connections anytime
   and anywhere via radio access links to the Internet.
   For this reason, several packet-oriented transmission modes have
   been proposed for next generation wireless standards like EGPRS
   (Enhanced General Packet Radio Service) or UMTS (Universal Mobile
   Telecommunications System), which are mostly based on the same
   principle: Long message blocks, i.e. IP packets, that enter the
   wireless part of the network are split up into segments of desired
   length, which can be multiplexed onto link layer packets of fixed
   size. The latter are then transmitted sequentially over the wireless
   link, reassembled, and passed on to the next network element.

   However, compared to the rather benign channel characteristics on
   today's fixed networks, wireless links suffer from severe fading,
   noise, and interference conditions in general, thus resulting in a
   comparably high residual bit error rate after detection and
   decoding. By use of efficient CRC-mechanisms, these bit errors are
   usually detected with very high probability, and every corrupted
   segment, i.e. which contains at least one erroneous bit, is

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   discarded to prevent error propagation through the network. But if
   only one single segment is missing at the reassembly stage, the
   upper layer IP packet cannot be reconstructed anymore. The result is
   a significant increase in packet loss rate at IP level.

   Since most multimedia applications can only recover from a very
   limited number of lost message blocks, it is vitally necessary to
   keep packet loss at IP level within a certain acceptable range
   depending on the individual quality-of-service requirements.
   However, due to the delay constraints typically imposed by most
   audio or video codecs, the use of ARQ-schemes is often prohibited
   both at link level and at transport level. In addition,
   retransmission strategies cannot be applied to any broadcast or
   multicast scenarios. Thus, forward erasure correction strategies
   have to be considered, which provide a simple means to reconstruct
   the content of lost packets at the receiver from the redundancy that
   has been spread out over a certain number of subsequent packets.

   There already exist some previous studies and proposals regarding
   erasure-resilient packet transmission, of whom the most important
   one with respect to RTP is described in [1]. Since most of them are
   based on the assumption that all parts in a message block are
   equally important to the receiver, i.e. the respective application
   cannot operate on partly complete blocks, they were optimized with
   respect to assigning equal erasure protection over the whole message
   block. However, recent developments both in audio and video coding
   have introduced the notion of progressively encoded source streams,
   for which unequal erasure protection strategies seem to be more
   promising, as it will be explained in more detail below. Although
   the scheme defined in [1] is in principle capable of supporting some
   kind of unequal erasure protection, possible implementations seem to
   be quite complex with respect to the gain in performance. Finally,
   in [1] it is assumed that subsequent RTP packets can have variable
   length, which would cause significant segmentation overhead at the
   link layer of almost all wireless systems.

   This document defines a payload format for RTP, such that different
   elements in a progressively encoded multimedia stream can be
   protected against packet erasures according to their respective
   quality-of-service requirement. The general principle, including the
   use of Reed-Solomon codes together with an appropriate interleaving
   scheme for adding redundancy, follows the ideas already presented in
   [2], but allows for finer granularity in the structure of the
   progressive source stream. The proposed scheme is generic in the way
   that it (1) is independent of the type of multimedia stream, be it
   audio or video, and (2) can be adapted to varying transmission
   quality very quickly by use of inband-signaling.







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4. Reed-Solomon Codes

   Reed-Solomon (RS) codes are a special class of linear nonbinary
   block codes, which are known to offer maximum erasure correction
   capability with minimum amount of redundancy.

   An arbitrary t-erasure-correcting (n,k) RS code defined over Galois
   field GF(q) has the following parameters [3]:
   - Block length:                                      n=q-1
   - No. of information symbols in a codeword:          k
   - No. of parity-check symbols in a codeword:         n-k=t
   - Minimum distance:                                  d=t+1

   In what follows, only systematic RS codes over GF(2^8) shall be
   considered, i.e. the symbols of interest can be directly related to
   a tuple of eight bits, which is commonly called a byte in packet
   transmission. The principle structure of a codeword is shown in Fig.
   1.
   By shortening the initial (n=255,n-t) RS code, any desired (n',n'-t)
   RS code for a given erasure correction capability t may be obtained.


     block of n bytes
   <----------------->
   +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
   |&|&|&|&|&|&|&|*|*|
   +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
   <------------><--->
       k=n-t       t
     (&:info)     (*:parity)

   Fig. 1: Structure of a systematic RS codeword



5. Progressive Source Coding

   If the output of a multimedia codec, be it audio or video, is said
   to be progressive, the encoded bitstream must consist of several
   distinct elements, often organized in separate layers. The latter
   shall be defined via their relative importance with respect to the
   quality of the reconstruction process at the receiver. Hence, there
   exists at least one layer, often called base layer, without which
   reconstruction fails at all, whereas all the other layers, often
   called enhancement layers, just help to continually improve the
   quality. Consequently, the different layers shall be mapped on the
   bitstream in decreasing order of importance, i.e. the base layer
   data is followed by the various enhancement layers.
   An example can be found in the fine granular scalability modes which
   have been proposed to various standardization bodies like MPEG-4 [4]
   or ITU (H.26L) [5], where the resolution of the scaling process in
   the progressive source encoder is as low as one symbol in the
   enhancement layer.

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   From the above definition, it is quite obvious that the most
   important base layer data must be protected as strongly as possible
   against packet loss during transmission. However, the protection of
   the enhancement layers could be continually lowered, since a loss at
   this stage has only minor consequences for the reconstruction
   process. Thus, by using a suitable unequal erasure protection
   strategy across the message block, which contains the progressively
   encoded source stream, the overhead due to redundancy spent per
   block is reduced. Furthermore, if channel conditions get worse
   during transmission, only more and more enhancement layers are lost,
   i.e. a graceful degradation in application quality at the receiver
   is achieved [6].



6. General Structure of UXP schemes

   Fig. 1 already illustrated the structure of a systematic codeword,
   which shall be represented by a single row and n successive columns
   that contain the information and the parity bytes. This structure
   shall now be extended by forming a transmission block (TB)
   consisting of L codewords of length n bytes each, which amounts to a
   total of L rows and n columns [7]: Each column shall represent the
   payload of an RTP packet, i.e. the whole data of a TB is transmitted
   via a sequence of n RTP packets all carrying a payload of length L
   bytes.

   The value of L should be chosen in such a way that the whole length
   of the resulting IP packet (i.e. RTP payload plus sum of UXP, RTP,
   UDP, and IP header) equals a multiple of the segment size on the
   wireless link to avoid stuffing at the data link layer.


   As depicted in Fig. 2, the rows of the block shall be partitioned
   into T+1 different classes CA_i, where i=0...T, such that each class
   contains exactly A_i=|CA_i| consecutive rows of the matrix, where
   the A_i have to satisfy the following relationship:

   A_0+A_1+...+A_T=L














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   Transmission Block (TB)
                                 T
                             <------->
                /\ +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ /\
                |  |&|&|&|&|&|*|*|*|*|  |
                |  +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+  |  A_T=3
                |  |&|&|&|&|&|*|*|*|*|  |
                |  +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+  |
   L bytes      |  |&|&|&|&|&|*|*|*|*| \/
   payload      |  +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ /\
   per packet   |  +%|%|%|%|%|%|*|*|*|  |  A_(T-1)=1
                |  +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ \/
                |  |$|$|$|$|$|$|$|*|*|  .
                |  +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+  .
                |  |º|º|º|º|º|º|º|º|*|  .
                |  +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ /\
                |  |#|#|#|#|#|#|#|#|#|  |  A_0=1
                \/ +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ \/
                   <----------------->
                         n packets

   &,%,$,º,# : info bytes belonging to a certain source coding layer in
               decreasing order of importance
   * :         parity bytes gained from Reed-Solomon coding

   Fig. 2: General structure for coding with unequal erasure protection


   Furthermore, all rows in a particular class CA_i shall contain
   exactly the same number of parity bytes, which is equal to the index
   i of the class. For each row in a certain class CA_i, the same (n,n-
   i) RS code shall be applied.

   As can be observed from Fig. 2, class CA_T contains the largest
   number of parity bytes per row, i.e. offers the highest erasure
   protection capability in the block. Consequently, all base layer
   data must be assigned to class CA_T, where the value of T should be
   chosen according to the desired outage threshold of the base layer
   given a certain packet erasure rate on the link.
   All other classes CA_(T-1)...CA_0 shall be sequentially filled with
   enhancement layer data in decreasing order of importance, where the
   optimal choice for the size of each class (0 or more rows), i.e. the
   structure of the redundancy profile, should depend on the quality-
   of-service requirements for the various layers.

   The following set of rules contains a compact description of all the
   operations that must be performed for each transmission block:

   1.) The total number of columns n of the TB shall be chosen
   according to the actual delay constraints of the application.




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   2.) The maximum erasure correction capability T should be chosen
   according to the desired outage threshold of the base layer given
   the actual packet erasure rate on the link.

   3.) The redundancy profile for the rest of the TB should depend on
   the size and number of the various layers in the progressive source
   stream, as well as the desired probability of successful decoding
   for each of them (quality-of-service requirement).

   4.) Beginning with the base layer, each layer in the progressive
   source stream shall be assigned to exactly one class CA_T...CA_0 in
   decreasing order of importance.

   5.) For each nonempty class CA_i, i=T...0, the following steps have
   to be performed:
   a) All rows of this specific class shall be filled from left to
   right and top to bottom with data bytes of the corresponding layer.
   If the size of the layer is less than the available space for this
   class, the empty positions may be filled with the first bytes of the
   next layer (in decreasing order of importance), such that there is
   no overhead due to stuffing.
   b) For each row in the class, the required i parity-check bytes are
   computed from the same set of codewords of an (n,n-i) RS code, and
   filled in the empty positions at the end of each row. Thus, every
   row in the class constitutes a valid codeword of the chosen RS code.

   6.) If the total length of the progressively encoded source stream
   exceeds the number of available info byte positions in the TB for
   the chosen redundancy profile, the final bytes of the least
   important enhancement layer shall be cut off until the remaining
   parts fit completely into the TB.

   7.) If the total length of the progressively encoded source stream
   is less than the number of available info byte positions  in the TB
   for the chosen redundancy profile, byte-stuffing shall be applied to
   the empty positions in the last class such that the stuffing value
   does not influence the performance of the multimedia decoder at the
   receiver.

   8.) After having filled the whole TB with information and parity
   bytes, each column is read out byte-wise from top to bottom and
   mapped onto the payload part of one and only one RTP packet.

   9.) The n resulting RTP packets shall be transmitted subsequently to
   the remote host, starting with the leftmost one.

   10.) At the corresponding protocol entity at the remote host, the
   payload of all successfully received RTP packets belonging to the
   same sending TB shall be filled into a similar receiving TB column-
   wise from top to bottom and left to right.

   11.) For every erased packet of a received TB, the respective column
   in the TB shall be filled with a suitable erasure marker.

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   12.) Given the redundancy profile assigned by the sender, for each
   row a decoding operation shall be performed by applying any suitable
   algorithm for erasure decoding.

   13.) For all rows for which the decoding operation has been
   successful, the reconstructed data bytes are read out from left to
   right and top to bottom, and appended to the reconstructed version
   of the progressive data stream.

   14.) For all rows for which the decoding operation has not been
   successful, a sufficient number of suitable dummy symbols may be
   added to the reconstructed data stream to inform the source decoder
   about the missing symbols.


   One can easily realize that the above rules describe an interleaver,
   i.e. at the sender a single codeword of a TB is spread out over n
   successive packets. Thus, each codeword of a transmitted TB
   experiences the same number of erasures at exactly the same
   positions.
   Two important conclusions can be drawn from this:
   a) Since the same RS code is applied to all rows contained in a
   specific class, either all of them can be correctly decoded or not.
   Hence, there exist no partly decodable classes at the receiver.
   b) If decoding is successful for a certain class CA_i, all the
   classes CA_(i+1)...CA_T can also be decoded, since they are
   protected by at least one more parity byte per row. Together with
   rule 4, it is therefore always ensured, that in case a decodable
   enhancement layer exists, the base layer it depends on can also be
   reconstructed!


   Given the maximum erasure protection value T, the redundancy profile
   for a TB of size (L x n) shall be denoted by a so-called erasure
   protection vector AV of length (T+1), where

   AV:=(A_0,A_1,...,A_(T-1),A_T)


   From the above definition, it is easy to realize that the trivial
   cases of no erasure protection and EXP are a subset of UXP:
   a) no erasure protection at all: all application data is mapped onto
      class CA_0, i.e. AV=(L,0,0,...,0).
   b) EXP: all application data is mapped onto class CA_T, i.e.
      AV=(0,0,...,0,A_T=L).

   Hence, backward compatibility to currently standardized non-
   progressive multimedia codecs is definitely achieved.





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7. RTP payload structure

   For every packet whose payload results from reading out a column of
   the TB, the RTP header must be followed by an UXP header.

7.1. Specific settings in the RTP header

   The timestamp of each RTP packet resulting from reading out a TB is
   set to the time instant when the first byte of the progressive
   source data stream has been written into the TB. This results in the
   TS value being the same for all RTP packets belonging to a specific
   TB.

   The payload type is of dynamic type, and obtained through out-of-
   band signaling similar to [1]. The signaling protocol must establish
   a payload length to be associated with the payload type value. End
   systems, which cannot recognize a payload type, must discard it.

   All other fields in the RTP header are set to those values proposed
   for regular multimedia transmission using the same source codecs,
   but no erasure protection scheme enabled.

7.2. Structure of the UXP header

   The UXP header shall consist of 2 octets, and is shown in Fig. 3:

    0                   1 1 1 1 1 1
    0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5
   +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
   |X|  block PT   | block length n|
   +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+

   Fig. 3: Proposed UXP header


   The fields in the header shall be defined as follows:
   - X (bit 0): extension bit, reserved for future enhancements,
                currently not in use -> default value: 0

   - block PT (bits 1-7): regular RTP payload type to indicate the
                          primary source encoding of the media

   - block length n (bits 8-15): indicates total number of RTP packets
                                 resulting from one TB (which equals
                                 the number of columns of the TB)

   Based on the RTP sequence number and the repetition of the block
   length n in each UXP header, the receiving entity is able to
   recognize both TB boundaries and the actual position of lost packets
   in the TB. Furthermore, the specific choice of equal TS values for
   all RTP packets belonging to a TB allows for overcoming possible
   sequence number overflow.


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7.3. In-band signaling of the structure of the redundancy profile

   To enable a dynamic adaptation to varying link conditions, the
   actual redundancy profile used for a specific TB must be signaled to
   the receiving entity. Since out-of-band signaling either results in
   excessive additional control traffic, or prevents quick changes of
   the profile between successive TBs, an in-band signaling procedure
   is desired.

   As without knowledge of the correct redundancy profile, the decoding
   process cannot be applied to any of the erasure protection classes,
   it has to be protected as least as strongly as the base layer data
   against packet loss. Therefore, a new class CA_P is added to the
   beginning of the TB, where the number of parity symbols is by
   default set to the following value:

   P=ceil(n/2)

   Hence, up to 50% of the RTP packets can be lost, before the
   redundancy profile cannot be recovered anymore. This seems to be a
   reasonable value for the lowest point of operation over a lossy
   link. Alternatively, p may be explicitly signaled during session
   setup by means of SDP or H.245 protocol.

   Consequently, since all other classes must have equal or less
   erasure protection capability, the maximum allowable value for class
   CA_T is now limited to T<=P.

   The signaling of the erasure protection vector is accomplished by
   means of descriptors. For each class CA_i with A_i>0, there is a
   descriptor DP_i providing information about the size of class CA_i
   (i.e. the value of A_i) and establishing a relationship between the
   erasure protection of class CA_i and that of the first preceding
   class CA_(i+j) with A_(i+j)>0, where j>0. A descriptor DP_i is
   mapped onto one byte, which is sub-divided into two half-bytes (i.e.
   the higher and the lower four bits). The first half-byte is of type
   unsigned and contains the 4-bit representation of the decimal value
   A_i. The second half-byte is also of type unsigned and contains the
   difference in erasure protection between class CA_i and class
   CA_(i+j), i.e. the 4-bit representation of the decimal value j. Note
   that the erasure protection p and the size A_p=1 of class CA_p are
   fixed.

   Thus, the data to be filled into class CA_p shall consist of a
   sequence of descriptors, where the number of descriptors is given by
   the number of protection classes CA_i, 0<=i<=T, with A_i>0. When the
   number of necessary descriptors exceeds the n-p information
   positions, the remaining descriptors are assigned to the next non-
   empty class CA_i providing the highest erasure protection. If the
   number of descriptors is less than n-p, however, empty positions in
   class CA_p may be filled up with the first bytes of the base layer
   to avoid stuffing.


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   The transition from descriptors to payload data needs not to be
   signaled to the decoder, since it can be determined by the decoder
   through evaluation of the decoded descriptors and the a-priori
   knowledge of the length L of the transmission block TB.
   Nevertheless, it can also be signaled explicitly by the otherwise
   unused descriptor 0x00.

   The complete structure of the TB is now depicted in Fig. 4.


   Transmission Block (TB)
                                P
                           <--------->
                /\ +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ /\
                |  |?|?|?|?|*|*|*|*|*|  |  A_P=1
                |  +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ \/
                |  |&|&|&|&|&|*|*|*|*| /\
                |  +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+  |  A_T=3
                |  |&|&|&|&|&|*|*|*|*|  |
                |  +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+  |
   L bytes      |  |&|&|&|&|&|*|*|*|*| \/
   payload      |  +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ /\
   per packet   |  +%|%|%|%|%|%|*|*|*|  |  A_(T-1)=1
                |  +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ \/
                |  |$|$|$|$|$|$|$|*|*|  .
                |  +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+  .
                |  |º|º|º|º|º|º|º|º|*|  .
                |  +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ /\
                |  |#|#|#|#|#|#|#|#|#|  |  A_0=1
                \/ +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ \/
                   <----------------->
                         n packets

   ? :          descriptors for in-band signaling of the redundancy
                profile

   &,%,$,º,# :  info bytes belonging to a certain source coding layer
                in decreasing order of importance

   * :          parity bytes gained from Reed-Solomon coding


   Fig. 4: General structure for UXP with in-band signaling of the
   redundancy profile


   The following simple example is meant to illustrate the idea behind
   using descriptors: Let an erasure protection vector of length T+1=7
   be given as follows:
   AV=(A_0,A_1,...,A_5,A_6)=(7,0,2,2,0,3,10)
   Hence, the length L of the TB (including one row for the
   descriptors) is equal to 7+2+2+3+10+1=25 (rows/bytes). If the width


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Internet Draft        Unequal Erasure Protection        September 2000


   is assumed to be equal to 20 (columns/packets), then the erasure
   protection of the descriptors is p=10.
   The corresponding sequence of descriptors can be written as
   DP=(DP_6,DP_5,DP_3,DP_2,DP_0)=(0xA4,0x31,0x22,0x21,0x72),
   where the values of the descriptors are given in hexadecimal
   notation.


8. Security Considerations

   The issues addressed in this IETF draft are not subject to any
   security considerations.



9. References

   [1] J. Rosenberg and H. Schulzrinne, "An RTP Payload Format for
   Generic Forward Error Correction", Request for Comments 2733,
   Internet Engineering Task Force, Dec. 1999.

   [2] A. Albanese, J. Bloemer, J. Edmonds, M. Luby, and M. Sudan,
   "Priority encoding transmission", IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory, vol.
   42, no. 6, pp. 1737-1744, Nov. 1996.

   [3] Shu Lin and Daniel J. Costello, Error Control Coding:
   Fundamentals and Applications, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood
   Cliffs, N.J., 1983.

   [4] W. Li: "Fine Granularity Scalability Using Bit-Plane Coding of
   DCT Coefficients", ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11, Doc. MPEG98/M4204, Dec.
   1998.

   [5] G. Blaettermann, G. Heising, and D. Marpe: "A Quality Scalable
   Mode for H.26L", ITU-T SG16, Q.15, Q15-J24, Osaka, May 2000.

   [6] F. Burkert, T. Stockhammer, and J. Pandel, "Progressive A/V
   coding for lossy packet networks - a principle approach", Tech.
   Rep., ITU-T SG16, Q.15, Q15-I36, Red Bank, N.J., Oct. 1999.

   [7] Guenther Liebl, "Modeling, theoretical analysis, and coding for
   wireless packet erasure channels", Diploma Thesis, Inst. for
   Communications Engineering, Munich University of Technology, 1999.



10. Acknowledgments

   Many thanks to Thomas Stockhammer, who initially came up with the
   idea of unequal erasure protection to improve progressive video
   transmission over lossy networks.



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Internet Draft        Unequal Erasure Protection        September 2000



11. Author's Addresses

   Minh-Ha Nguyen, Guenther Liebl, Thomas Stockhammer
   Institute for Communications Engineering (LNT)
   Munich University of Technology
   D-80290 Munich
   Germany
   Email: {nguyen,liebl,tom}@lnt.e-technik.tu-muenchen.de

   Frank Burkert
   Siemens AG - ICM MD MP
   D-81675 Munich
   Germany
   Email: frank.burkert@mch.siemens.de

   Juergen Pandel, Gero Baese
   Siemens AG - Corporate Technology ZT IK2
   D-81730 Munich
   Germany
   Email: {juergen.pandel,gero.baese}@mchp.siemens.de



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