Sliding‐window forward error correction using Reed‐Solomon code and unequal error protection for real‐time streaming video

Abstract

SummaryForward error correction (FEC) techniques are widely used to recover packet losses over unreliable networks in real-time video streaming applications.Traditional frame-level FEC encodes 1 video frame in each FEC coding window. By contrast, in the expanding-window FEC scheme, high-priority frames are included in the FEC processing of the following frames, so as to construct a larger coding window. In general, expanding-window FEC improves the recovery performance of FEC, because the high-priority frame can be protected by multiple windows and the use of a larger coding window increases the efficiency. However, the larger window size also increases the complexity of the coding and the memory space requirements. Consequently, expanding-window FEC is limited in terms of practical applications. Sliding-window FEC adopts a fixed window size in order to approximate the performance of the expanding-window FEC method, but with a reduced complexity. Previous studies on sliding-window FEC have generally adopted an equal error protection (EEP) mechanism to simplify the analysis. This paper considers the more practical case of an unequal error protection (UEP) strategy. An analytical model is derived for estimating the playable frame rate (PFR) of the proposed sliding-window FEC scheme with a Reed-Solomon erasure code for real-time non-scalable streaming applications. The analytical model is used to determine the optimal FEC configuration which maximizes the PFR value under given transmission rate constraints. The simulation results show that the proposed sliding-window scheme achieves almost the same performance as the expanding-window scheme, but with a significantly lower computational complexity. KEYWORDSforward error correction, playable frame rate, real-time video streaming, Reed-Solomon code, unequal error protection

Sliding-Window Forward Error Correction Based on Reference Order for Real-Time Video Streaming

“…Thus, the proposed FEC scheme outperforms both the time-order sliding-window FEC scheme [18] and the frame-level FEC scheme [7], particularly at high PLRs.…”

“…8, when the PLR is less than or equal to 6%, the three FEC schemes all exhibit high performance. When the PLR is 8%, 10%, 12%, 14%, 16%, 18%, and 20%, the PFR is respectively 0.939, 0.8841, 0.8535, 0.811, 0.7733, 0.7199, and 0.6823 for frame-level FEC [7] and 0.9729, 0.9421, 0.911, 0.8643, 0.8439, 0.791, and 0.7029 for time-order slidingwindow FEC [18]. When the proposed FEC scheme is used, the PFR is further increased to 0.992, 0.9891, 0.9886, 0.9825, 0.9783, 0.9493, and 0.8982, respectively.…”

“…(2) the conventional sliding-window FEC scheme based on time order (referred to simply as the sliding-window scheme for brevity) [18], and (3) the sliding-window FEC scheme based on reference order (the proposed scheme).…”

VQProtect: Lightweight Visual Quality Protection for Error-Prone Selectively Encrypted Video Streaming

“…An FEC coding scheme dubbed PATON was presented to address issues affecting the effective delivery of high-definition mobile videos such as high transmission rate, limited bandwidth, transmission errors, and throughput fluctuations [36]. The researchers [37] applied an FEC strategy by considering Un-Equal Protection (UEP). The proposed method achieved the same performance as that obtained from the expanding window strategy but with an improved computational cost.…”

Proposed dynamic error control techniques for QoS improvement of wireless 3D video transmission

“…Several ER techniques have been suggested to minimize the effect of packet damages prior to the 3D video transmission. In the state‐of‐the‐art works, automatic repeated request and forward error correction algorithms were proposed. Unfortunately, they increase the transmission bit rate and are not favorable for real‐time multimedia applications.…”