Improving Wireless Video Performance via Packet-Level FEC

Abstract

Wireless video transmission is often vulnerable to errors from the noisy wireless environment. Due to errors, the discarded link layer packets impose a serious limitation on the maximum achievable throughput over wireless channel. To face this challenge and to enhance the overall TCP-Friendly video throughput, this paper proposes an MPEG packet loss model which is based on Forward Error Correction (FEC) over wired-to-wireless channel. A FEC packet level scheme is used to act as an inter-protection control based on Reed-Solomon (RS) code providing a robust transmission against random packet loss. Hence, the predicted frame rate for MPEG video streaming can be estimated. Quality of service (QoS) in terms of frame rate and quality factor (Quantizer Scale) is also evaluated under various FEC code conditions. The new results demonstrate that the proposed scheme improves a video quality performance in high wireless channel bit errors in spite of an increment in the overhead packets due to FEC code.