Video streaming: an FEC-based novel approach

We present an end-to-end error control scheme based on forward error correction (FEC) for video streaming over the Internet and wireless access networks. We consider various types of transport impairment, including random bit errors, bursty channel error, and packet loss. Because of the stringent delay constraint on video streaming, we believe that FEC is more beneficial than other schemes such as re-transmission to combat transport impairment. In addition to the traditional way of packetizing the compressed video in a orthogonal direction with respect to the channel coding to combat packet loss and bursty errors, we propose a novel scheme of pre-interleaving in order to match the characteristics of video source coding. The application of such pre-interleaving is able to greatly improve the end-to-end performance of video streaming because the adoption of this pre-interleaving can simultaneously satisfy contrasting requirements arising from the channel coding and the source coding. We demonstrate that the proposed pre-interleaving scheme can greatly improve the performance of video streaming over traditional schemes for both Internet and wireless applications.