Adaptive multiple description coding for hybrid networks with dynamic PLR and BER

•We consider both the packet loss problem and bit error problem of the network simultaneously.•The redundancy of AMDC can be controlled preciously to combat the packet losses for a given packet loss rate.•The bit-error resilience of the central description towards any given bit error rate is always significantly better than others.•The performance of the side description is slightly worse than existed methods.

In a hybrid network, both the packet losses and the bit errors may affect the signal delivery performance. This problem becomes more serious when the packet loss rate (PLR) and the bit error rate (BER) change over time. Most existing solutions focus on either the packet loss problem or the bit error problem. We designed an adaptive multiple description coding (AMDC) scheme with the index assignment (IA) technique to solve these two problems simultaneously. The redundancy is added to AMDC to overcome the packet losses. And the redundancy rate can be precisely controlled to optimize the delivery performance for a given PLR, according to the end-to-end distortion model. Meanwhile, for any given BER, the bit error resilience of the scheme is guaranteed well by further exploiting the added redundancy in AMDC. Simulating results for an i.i.d. Gaussian source show that, the proposed scheme achieved significant improvement for both redundancy control and bit-error resilience simultaneously, comparing with existing solutions.