Hierarchical modulation for client-driven selective streaming of multi-view video over AWGN channels

We consider a client-driven selective streaming system for multi-view video, which is supported by scalable multi-view video coding (SMVC). The system is used to reduce bit-rates for efficient transmission of multi-view video. The transmit source is partitioned into three layers: a base and two enhancement layers. The base layer contains all views encoded by MVC at a low-quality, while each enhancement layer contains high-quality part of the selected left and right views, respectively. The base layer is more important than the enhancement layers to create 3D perception, albeit of low-quality, and should be more protected than the enhancement layers. In this paper, two-level and three-level hierarchical 64QAM are used to provide unequal error protection (UEP) for the client-driven selective streaming system. First we find the suitable hierarchical values, which is the ratio of the distances in hierarchical 64QAM, for the client-driven selective streaming system. Furthermore, we analyze numerically how the hierarchical 64QAM impacts peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) performance of fast and slow-motion sequences. Simulation results show that the three-level hierarchical 64QAM outperforms both conventional 64QAM with Gray mapping and the two-level hierarchical 64QAM in terms of achieving the target average PSNR performance at a low SNR environment.