"Multimedia multicasting/broadcasting to mobile devices (mobile phones, lap-tops, PDA’s, etc.) has generated much interest recently in both industry and research communities. While the first standards have been successfully launched, research efforts are focused on improving performance, expanding possibilities and services, and addressing clients’ heterogeneity. Among many challenges system designer is facing to ensure reliable high-quality, real-time, communication services in severe error-prone environment, the most important are the following: high video compression efficiency for bandwidth reduction, strong error protection due to many impairments typical in wireless transmission (noise, interference, fading, multipath, path loss, shadowing, etc.), adaptability to heterogeneous receiving devices (bandwidth, screen resolution, etc.), low complexity and power-efficiency of transmission schemes as mobile receivers have limited battery life. The goal of the proposed research is to address the problem of efficient and robust transmission schemes for real-time scalable image/video streaming to handheld devices with varying capabilities and transmission channels with varying severity. We plan to deeply investigate both channel (LDPC, Digital Fountain) and network code design, jointly optimized with the scalable image/video sources, with the aim of providing increased end-user Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees for the receivers of low capabilities, and at the same time providing users with higher capabilities with progressively higher QoS guarantees. As cooperation between mobile devices has been recently shown to be beneficiary in communicating information between source and destination, where one or more additional users may help the communication by serving as relay, our plan is to extend our research on joint source-channel code optimization to multi-user cooperative scenarios, and explore the benefits of network coding in multi-user multimedia communication."