The effectiveness of cell-level FEC for packet delivery in ATM networks

The authors examine the issue of how packet delivery can be made more reliable over ATM networks. While forward error correction (FEC) techniques have been proposed in the past by many researchers to address the data loss issues in ATM networks, the focus of the paper is on analyzing the cost-performance aspects of cell-level FEC for packet traffic. Specifically, they examine the tradeoff between the cost of increased bandwidth consumed by the FEC code versus the gain in packet error rate both through simulation and simple analytical models. The paper presents new analyses and results in two broad areas: i) the conditions under which FEC is effective in improving packer error rates, in terms of correlated cell loss levels for different packet sizes over different network extents, and ii) the cost-performance evaluation of using FEC in absolute terms that account for end-to-end delay, and the corresponding determination of the minimum physical network diameter over which FEC would be effective.