Diagonal XOR-Based FEC Method to Improve Burst-Loss Tolerance for 4K/8K UHDTV Transmission

Broadcasters are converting their live program production facilities to Internet Protocol (IP)-networks. The introduction of IP-networks has many possibilities such as cost reduction and remote production, and various efforts are underway. At present, the main issue is to consider the construction of equipment for 2K high definition television (HDTV), and it is expected that the introduction of higher speed 4K and 8K ultra-HDTV (UHDTV) will accelerate in the future. In video transmissions using high-speed signals, video degradation due to packet loss such as random loss and burst loss that occurs in the network-switch of a transmission path becomes a problem. In the case of 4K and 8K UHDTV transmissions, since the number of packets per unit time increases, this problem becomes more serious. Therefore, it is indispensable to apply quality compensation technology to achieve high-quality video transmission. Forward error correction (FEC) using erasure codes is a key compensation method for recovering lost packets at the receiving side in unidirectional transmission. In this paper, we propose an exclusive OR-based FEC method with improved burst loss tolerance. Using this method, we have developed a transmission device for uncompressed 8K UHDTV signals over IP-networks using 100-Gb/s Ethernet packets. Experimental and simulation results clarified that the proposed method can improve the number of recoverable packets at the time of burst loss to twice as many as the conventional Pro-MPEG FEC method.