Network-Adaptive Transport Error Control for Reliable Wireless Media Transmission

In wireless network environments, wireless channels are characterized by time-varying fading and interference conditions, which may lead to burst packet corruptions and delay variation. This can cause severe quality degradation of streaming media. To guarantee successful transmission of media over the hostile wireless networks, where channel conditions are highly fluctuating, a flexible and network-adaptive transport method is required. Thus, we propose a network-adaptive transport error control consisting of packet-level interleaved FEC and delay-constrained ARQ, which acts as an application-level transport method of streaming media to alleviate burst packet losses while adapting to the changing channel condition in wireless networks. The performances of the proposed network-adaptive transport error control, general error control schemes, and hybrid schemes are evaluated by a developed simulator at the transport-level and video quality of streaming media. Simulation results show that the proposed mechanism provides the best overall performance among compared other schemes in terms of the transport-level performance of error control and the performance of video quality for streaming media.