Enhancement of Adaptive Forward Error Correction Mechanism for Video Transmission Over Wireless Local Area Network

Video transmission over the wireless network faces many challenges. The most critical challenge is related to packet loss. To overcome the problem of packet loss, Forward Error Correction is used by adding extra packets known as redundant packet or parity packet. Currently, FEC mechanisms have been adopted together with Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) mechanism to overcome packet losses and avoid network congestion in various wireless network conditions. The number of FEC packets need to be generated effectively because wireless network usually has varying network conditions. In the current Adaptive FEC mechanism, the FEC packets are decided by the average queue length and average packet retransmission times. The Adaptive FEC mechanisms have been proposed to suit the network condition by generating FEC packets adaptively in the wireless network. However, the current Adaptive FEC mechanism has some major drawbacks such as the reduction of recovery performance which injects too many excessive FEC packets into the network. This is not flexible enough to adapt with varying wireless network condition. Therefore, the enhancement of Adaptive FEC mechanism (AFEC) known as Enhanced Adaptive FEC (EnAFEC) has been proposed. The aim is to improve recovery performance on the current Adaptive FEC mechanism by injecting FEC packets dynamically based on varying wireless network conditions. The EnAFEC mechanism is implemented in the simulation environment using Network Simulator 2 (NS-2). Performance evaluations are also carried out. The EnAFEC was tested with the random uniform error model. The results from experiments and performance analyses showed that EnAFEC mechanism outperformed the other Adaptive FEC mechanism in terms of recovery efficiency. Based on the findings, the optimal amount of FEC generated by EnAFEC mechanism can recover high packet loss and produce good video quality

Implementation and validation of an adaptive FEC machanism for video transmission

This research focuses on investigating the FEC mechanism as an error recovery over a wireless network.The existing adaptive FEC mechanism faces a major drawback, which is the reduction of recovery performance by injecting too many excessive FEC packets into the network. Thus, this paper proposes the implementation of an enhanced adaptive FEC (EnAFEC) mechanism for video transmission together with its validation process.There are two propositions in the EnAFEC enhancement, which include block length adaptation and implementation, and suitable smoothing factor value determination.The EnAFEC adjusts the FEC packets based on the wireless network condition so that excessive FEC packets can be reduced.The proposed enhancement is implemented in a simulation environment using the NS-2 network simulation.The simulation results show that EnAFEC generates less FEC packets than the other types of adaptive FEC (EAFEC and Mend FEC).In addition, a validation phase is also conducted to verify that the proposed enhancement is functioning correctly, and represents a real network situation.In the validation phase, the results obtained from the simulation are compared to the outputs of the other adaptive FEC mechanisms.The validation results show that the mechanism is successfully implemented in NS2 since the number of packet loss falls under the overlapping confidence intervals