A real-time forward error correction of changing redundant packets' position for video transmission

Packet-level forward error correction (FEC) codes are widely studied to protect real-time video transmission over unreliable networks. The performance of FEC improves with the FEC coding block size when the number of redundancy packets is determined. But for real-time video transmission, the decoding delay which it leads to cannot be tolerable. Besides, the packet loss in one frame affects not only the current frame, but could also include all the following frames which refer to it. To solve this dilemma, Xiao [14] proposed a real-time video streaming scheme using randomized expanding Reed-Solomon (RE-RS) code. In the scheme, the Reed-Solomon coding block includes not only the video packets of the current frame, but could also include all the video packets of previous frames in the current group of pictures. Since video packets of the following frames are not encompassed in the RS coding block, no delay will be caused for waiting for the video or parity packets of the following frames both at encoding and decoding sides. The performance of the scheme is excellent, but it can still be improved when burst packet loss occurs. In this paper, we proposed a novel scheme by changing the parity packets' position of RE-RS. Besides, the parity packets are generated using packets of current BS rather than of current and all previous frames of the current GOP. The modification is simple and easy to implement. Experimental results show that our scheme improves average 5% and even 10% some time with burst length equaling 2 in Gilbert model. And in the condition with random packets loss, the performance of our method is almost the same as that of RE-RS. As a result, we can simply replace RE-RS with ours without judging whether burst packet loss occurs in practice.