Optimal erasure protection assignment for scalable compressed data with small channel packets and short channel codewords

We are concerned with the efficient transmission of scalable compressed data over lossy communication channels. Recent works have proposed several strategies for assigning optimal code redundancies to elements in a scalable data stream under the assumption that all elements are encoded onto a common group of network packets. When the size of the data to be encoded becomes large in comparison to the size of the network packets, such schemes require very long channel codes with high computational complexity. In networks with high loss, small packets are generally more desirable than long packets. This paper proposes a robust strategy for optimally assigning elements of the scalable data to clusters of packets, subject to constraints on packet size and code complexity. Given a packet cluster arrangement, the scheme then assigns optimal code redundancies to the source elements subject to a constraint on transmission length. Experimental results show that the proposed strategy can outperform previously proposed code redundancy assignment policies subject to the above-mentioned constraints, particularly at high channel loss rates.