An Improved FEC Scheme for Mobile Wireless Communication at Vehicular Speeds

WiMAX has emerged as a promising wireless communication technology with potential to deliver high throughput and guaranteed quality of service to the end applications. Recent studies suggest that while WiMAX (802.16e) is capable of delivering a data rate of up to 75 Mbps for fixed wireless communications, data rate decreases drastically for mobile wireless communications, often providing a data rate less than 1 Mb/s when the mobile nodes travel at vehicular speeds. High bit error rate caused at high vehicular speeds is the key reason for low throughput. In noisy mobile communication environments, standard error control mechanisms like the transmission control protocol (TCP) has limited and often,detrimental impacts on the overall throughput because of the excessive retransmission overheads. To address this issue, WiMAX standard incorporates forward error correction (FEC) mechanism that eliminates the need for retransmissions. In FEC, extra parity bits are added to the original message to recover the corrupted information. Adaptive FEC that adjusts the size of extra parity bits in response to packet retransmission requests is an enhancement over standard FEC that uses fixed block of party bits. Existing adaptive FEC schemes, however, have limited efficiency when the end terminal moves at vehicular speeds. In this paper, we propose a new FEC scheme that estimates and adjusts the size of extra parity bits to suit the channel conditions. We apply the concept of interval based data sampling to address the dynamic nature of communication environments at high vehicular speeds. We simulate the proposed scheme for a centralized live video surveillance system in a public train where the train is the mobile node and sends real-time video data to the base stations on train platforms. The results show that the proposed scheme achieves significantly higher throughput and lower jitter compared to other standard schemes.