Adaptive two-stage FEC scheme for scalable video transmission over wireless networks

In this paper, we present a two-stage forward error correction (FEC) scheme with an enhanced link-layer protocol especially for multimedia data transmission over wireless LANs. At the application layer, packet-level FEC (stage-one) is added across packets to correct packet losses due to congestion and route disruption. Bit-level FEC (stage-two) is then added to both application packets and stage-one FEC packets to recover bit errors from the link layer. Then at the link layer, header-CRC/FEC is used to enhance protection and to cooperate with the two-stage FEC scheme. The proposed scheme thus provides joint protection across the protocol stack. We explore both its bandwidth efficiency and video performance for the highly efficient and scalable MC-EZBC video codec using the network simulator ns-2. Our results show that the proposed scheme can effectively increase application-layer throughput, reduce both end-to-end transmission delay and application bandwidth fluctuation, and significantly improve video performance.