Interleaved coding and sequential transmission scheme for packet-level forward error correction over burst loss channels

Burst packet loss is a common problem over wired and wireless networks and leads to a significant reduction in the performance of packet-level forward error correction (FEC) schemes used to recover packet losses during transmission. Traditional FEC interleaving methods adopt the sequential coding-interleaved transmission (SCIT) process to encode the FEC packets sequentially and reorder the packet transmission sequence. Consequently, the burst loss effect can be mitigated at the expense of an increased end-to-end delay. Alternatively, the reversed interleaving scheme, namely, interleaved coding-sequential transmission (ICST), performs FEC coding in an interleaved manner and transmits the packets sequentially based on their generation order in the application. In this study, the analytical FEC model is constructed to evaluate the performance of the SCIT and ICST schemes. From the analysis results, it can be observed that the interleaving delay of ICST FEC is reduced by transmitting the source packets immediately as they arrive from the application. Accordingly, an Enhanced ICST scheme is further proposed to trade the saved interleaving time for a greater interleaving capacity, and the corresponding packet loss rate can be minimized under a given delay constraint. The simulation results show that the Enhanced ICST scheme achieves a lower packet loss rate and a higher peak signal-to-noise-ratio than the traditional SCIT and ICST schemes for video streaming applications.