Enhancing reliable mobile multicasting with RaptorQ FEC

A crucial point on the successful deployment of multicast services is the enhanced reliability by means of advanced error control schemes. To this direction Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has standardized exclusively for Multimedia Broadcast/Multicast Services (MBMS) the use of a Forward Error Correction (FEC) mechanism on the application layer based on Raptor codes. Since the standardized systematic, fountain Raptor code is now considered obsolete, the emergence of a new variant of Raptor codes, named RaptorQ, provides enhanced capabilities for mobile multicast services. In this paper, we provide a performance comparison of the standardized Raptor Application Layer FEC (AL-FEC) scheme with the very promising RaptorQ FEC code. We examine the enhancements that RaptorQ introduces on the AL-FEC protection robustness, providing a thorough performance analysis in comparison with the current Raptor FEC scheme. Furthermore, in order to verify the improved performance of RaptorQ, we provide several simulation results utilizing the ns-3 environment, considering the application of both the examined AL-FEC schemes over multicast services for next generation mobile networks.