Performance evaluation of FEC techniques based on BCH codes in video streaming over wireless sensor networks

Video streaming in wireless sensor networks is a promising and challenging application. The reduced amount of available bandwidth, as well as the low-computational power available for acquiring and processing video frames on tiny devices, imposes the transmission of low resolution video frames at a low frame rate. In such a scenario the amount of information carried by each video frame must be preserved as mush as possible in order to avoid possible artifacts in the reconstructed dynamics of the scene. In this paper we first evaluate the impact of the bit error rate on the quality of the received video stream, then we propose a forward error correction technique based on the use of BCH codes to preserve the video quality. The proposed technique, fully compliant with the IEEE802.15.4 standard, reaches a PSNR improvement of 1.95 dB, with respect to the plain transmission, while requiring an additional minimal overhead of 22.51% in the number of transmitted bits. When a higher protection level is exploited a PSNR improvement of 3.72 dB has been experienced at the cost of 40.74% additional overhead.