A RED-FEC Mechanism for Video Transmission Over WLANs

This paper proposes a Random Early Detection Forward Error Correction (RED-FEC) mechanism to improve the quality of video delivered over Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). In contrast to previous FEC schemes, in which the rate determination information is fed back from the receiver side, in our proposed method, the redundancy rate is calculated directly at the wireless Access Point (AP) in accordance with the network traffic load, as indicated by the AP queue length. An analytical model is developed to predict the effective packet loss rate of a video stream delivered over a WLAN with RED-FEC protection. The numerical results show that the proposed RED-FEC mechanism consistently achieves higher recovery efficiency than a conventional FEC scheme under high and low network loading conditions.