SUMMARYA novel approach called priority encoding transmission (PET) was recently proposed to guarantee delivery of the highest-priority data and/or the timely recovery of real-time data in the transmission of multimedia information over lossy networks. PET allows different segments of a message to be assigned priority levels, resulting in encoding information with different amounts of redundancy; the receiver is then able to recover the information in priority order, based only on the number of packets received per message. In this paper we propose a methodology to determine the fractions of the packets sent that are needed at the receiver to meet the quality of service (QoS) loss requirements specified by the user. It allows mapping of the required segment loss probabilities on the corresponding parameters of the PET system. As a relevant case study, the proposed methodology has been applied to the transmission of MPEG video signals over an ATM network using PET. 8-10 A PET system is designed to be an independent interface between a packet-switched As asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks move to higher speeds over very reliable fibre network and any scalable application (i.e. applications with streams consisting of several data parts media, the effects of bit corruption become smaller and cell loss caused by congestion becomes domiwith different importance). In PET systems the sender partitions the message to be transmitted into nant as transmission error. The use of techniques based on automatic retransmission, such as autosegments and assigns each segment a priority; higher-priority segments consist of the most matic repeat request (ARQ), to recover from loss may lead to high transmission delays which may be important information and lower-priority segments consist of optional enhancing information, as is usuacceptable for applications involving the exchange of interactive data but not for applications with ally done when the problem of encoding multimedia or multilevel data arises (see, for example Referlow latency constraints (such as human interaction, remote sensing, etc.). For this reason, forward error ences 11-15). The message is encoded into a set of packets. Based on the priority of each segment, correction (FEC) has been proposed as an alternative to ARQ as the way to recover from loss. [1][2][3][4][5] More the information is distributed over all the packets sent and each packet contains relatively more inforspecifically, some FEC-based schemes have been introduced which provide different levels of error mation about the higher-priority segments. The priority of a segement specifies the fraction of the protection for segments of a message that are characterized by different relative importance or suspackets sent needed (fopn) at the receiver to decode it; the receiver is then able to recover the inforceptibility to errors. 6 In any case, however, FECbased schemes are only effective when losses are mation in priority order, based only on the number of packets received per message. Thanks to the ...