Efficient authentication of scalable media streams over wireless networks

Media authentication of wireless transmission is becoming an increasingly important issue. Authenticated media content is constantly required to be transcoded at intermediates to accommodate heterogeneous applications. In this paper, a general and efficient authentication approach is proposed for scalable lossy media streams. Firstly, a joint coding and stream authentication (JCSA) media transmission system is described in a heterogeneous wireless network. For the JCSA system, a novel structure-maintained packetization is designed to realize flexible transcoding. Secondly, to obtain the optimal end-to-end quality and minimize the authentication overhead, a quality-optimized stream authentication (QOSA) framework is proposed for authenticating media content. Finally, an implementation of the proposed QOSA optimization framework on the consultative committee for space data systems image data compression (CCSDS IDC) coder is presented by combining graph-based and error-correction coding based (ECC-based) approaches. Experimental results demonstrate that our scheme can achieve the desired goal that it provides high robustness against packet-loss at the cost of a very low overhead.