New interleaving and forward error correction strategies for streaming

Abstract

If the frame size of a multimedia encoder is small, Internet Protocol streaming applications need to pack many encoded media frames in each Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) packet to avoid unnecessary header overhead. Forward Error Correction (FEC) can be used in order to minimize the probability of packet loss in bursty loss environments such as network congestions. FEC is one of the techniques used to tackle loss problem by adding redundant data to the flow and helping receivers to recover missed data. In this paper, we present an approach for interleaving packets optimized for different situation of networks. Considering time constraints in multimedia streaming, we change the number of redundant FEC packets according to the condition of network, so that the experienced frame loss rate does not vary greatly under different packet loss rates. We present the results of simulation using NS2 simulator. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.