Prioritized transmission of layered media with layer-aware FEC

In this thesis we present new ideas for improving components of communication systems via prioritized transmission of layered media. It shows how today's mobile broadcast systems can already integrate or can be extended towards the concept of layered media transmission with prioritized transmission. The performance evaluation of such systems shows a significant benefit compared to existing systems. The thesis furthermore introduces a new concept for FEC. The so called Layer-Aware FEC (LA-FEC) exploits the coding structure of a layered media stream and increases its error correction capabilities without any additional data. In this thesis, the LA-FEC scheme is integrated into state-of-the-art Raptor FEC and analyzed in detail over theoretical channel models and real systems. The combination of LA-FEC with an unequal time interleaving scheme is a novel approach that allows for the first time to setup mobile broadcast services which inherently enable fast tune-in capability while at the same time providing long time interleaving. The discussion within this thesis and the novel approaches show that the concept of prioritized transmission of layered media promises significant benefits for the provisioning of media services, especially for Mobile TV services. However, it adds at the same time a large number of degrees of freedom through which performance and QoE can be tuned which makes it challenging to optimize parameter setup in real systems. To ease such a discussion, this thesis discusses guidelines for provisioning of media services taking into account the desired application.