A Network Adaptive Forward Error Correction Mechanism to Overcome Burst Packet Losses for Video Streaming over Wireless Networks

Abstract

Video streaming over wireless networks have many challenges due to the high packet error rate and burst packet losses problem characteristics which will cause the severe video quality degradation. Forward Error Correction (FEC) mechanism is popularly used to recover lost packets for video streaming over wireless networks. However, the recovery performance of conventional adaptive FEC mechanism is decreased when the burst packet losses happened. This paper proposed a Network Adaptive FEC (NAFEC) mechanism to alleviate this limitation. The NAFEC mechanism to enhance the recovery performance includes burst-aware control scheme to take account of average burst packet losses length and block interleaving control scheme to disperse burst packet losses into different FEC blocks. The experimental results indicate that compared to the conventional adaptive FEC mechanism, the NAFEC mechanism can enhance the overall transmission performance by recovering packet losses and thus improve the video quality for video streaming over wireless networks.