A forward error recovery technique for real-time MPEG-2 video transport and its performance over wireless IEEE 802.11 LAN

Real-time MPEG-2 video transport applications do not usually have the luxury of a reverse channel for recovering from any errors that might occur during communication. Degradation in quality of decoded video frames is immediately apparent in the presence of errors in headers. In this paper, we focus on protecting header information by replicating it in any free space that might be available in the defined MPEG-2 transport stream packets. We also present our implementation experience over wired ATM as well as wireless IEEE 802.11 LAN by incorporating this forward error recovery approach with a real-time MPEG-2 encoder. In our experiments, it is found that the free space available is generally more than adequate for replicating essential header information.