Forward-Looking Forward Error Correction Mechanism for Video Streaming over Wireless Networks

Video streaming over wireless network poses a great challenge because the high packet error rate usually decreases the quality of video streaming. Forward error correction (FEC) mechanism is generally used to protect the video quality. However, the recovery performance of the FEC mechanism decreases when burst packet loss is larger than the added FEC redundant packets. In this paper, the forward-looking forward error correction (FL-FEC) mechanism is proposed to recover lost packets for video streaming over wireless networks. The FL-FEC mechanism recovers not only the lost packet from its FEC block but also the previous FEC block from the recovered packet, repeating the recovery procedure until recovering the first FEC block. If the play-out buffer at the receiver is large, the FL-FEC mechanism can execute a chain of recovery procedures to ultimately recover all lost packets without any negative impact on application performance. The FL-FEC mechanism selects non-continuous source packets in previous FEC blocks to generate FEC redundancy with the FEC block. Hence, the FL-FEC mechanism can significantly disperse burst packet loss into different FEC blocks. The FL-FEC mechanism uses an analytical model to decide the number of FEC redundant packets in order to obtain the minimum recovery overhead. The FL-FEC mechanism is tested to show the benefits of high recovery performance and low recovery overhead in improving the peak signal-to-noise ratio and the decodable frame rate of video streaming over wireless networks.