Adaptation of Near-Perfect Packet-Level FEC Interleaving in Mobile Media Streaming

• Published in: Computer journal 2014-11, Vol.57 (11), p.1711-1722
• Main Authors: Tong, S.-R., Yu, Y.-T.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adaptation; Error correction & detection; Optimization; Simulation; Streaming media
• ISSN: 0010-4620; 1460-2067
• DOI: 10.1093/comjnl/bxt104

The error-recovery efficiency of packet-level forward-error-correction (PFEC) coding is sensitive to the loss-burst nature of mobile channels. Interleaving, which rearranges the packet transmission orders to scatter loss bursts, is commonly employed to help PFEC overcome this problem. Unfortunately, we still lack an efficient adaptation mechanism based on a tractable performance formulation that characterizes the tradeoffs between the interleaving and PFEC subject to network loss conditions (packet loss rate and loss correlation) and user requirements (buffer delay constraint and target packet loss rate). This paper addresses this issue by proposing an interleaving-first (IF) algorithm, in which we first pursue near-perfect interleaving based on a threshold mechanism, followed by optimizing PFEC throughput. Such an approach enables us to: (1) obtain a simplified performance model and (2) practice a simple systematic adaptation. The simulation confirms that the proposed scheme is capable of providing good quality sub-optimal solutions under typical mobile link conditions (i.e. the packet loss rate is ≤ 0.2, the mean burst length is ≤10 packets and the buffering delay is ≤256 packet times).