High-Quality Video Distribution using Power Line Communication and Aplication Layer Forward Error Correction

Power line communications (PLC) has proven its merits an in-house broadband communication network for IP services. However, designing challenging applications on such networks is still difficult task because of the "horrible channel". Long bursts of errors often occur as a result of e.g. cross-talk, radio-frequency interference and impulse noise making reliable communication quite difficult. Local means for QoS provision such as retransmission protocols have been studied. However, often in-house link is only the last hop in an end-to-end service with specific QoS requirements. For example, for high-quality video distribution in an end-to-end IPTV services, reliability, real-time, and low latency are essential. IPTV services nowadays already make use of application layer forward error correction codes to compensate longer outages of several milliseconds. Therefore, the inclusion of the in-house power line network into this end-to-end QoS architecture seems natural and straightforward. A prominent example of such FEC codes is the Raptor code which has recently been adopted for application layer FEC for DVB IPTV services. In this work, we study the application of Raptor codes for IPTV services and show that typical experienced long outages can be compensated by these codes. The results are complemented by interesting findings in system design which might lead to future optimizations of power line communications.