An adaptive multi-hop forward error correction protection scheme for video streaming over wireless mesh networks

Traditional forward error correction (FEC) mechanisms can be divided into end-to-end FEC protection schemes and hop-by-hop FEC protection schemes. The end-to-end FEC protection schemes over-allocate FEC redundancy to each link and may induce a self-congestion effect in a link. The hop-by-hop FEC protection scheme incurs a long end-to-end delay that harms the video performance at the video receiver. Accordingly, the Adaptive Multi-Hop FEC (AM-FEC) protection scheme is proposed in this paper to improve the quality of video streaming data over Wireless Mesh Networks by means of simultaneously minimizing the end-to-end delay and reducing the FEC computational cost. The AM-FEC protection scheme uses a heuristic algorithm to minimize the number of FEC-encoded segments between the video sender and receiver. Moreover, according to the decodable frame rate the AM-FEC protection scheme can dynamically adjust FEC redundancy on each link to outperform end-to-end FEC protection schemes and hop-by-hop FEC protection schemes. In the experiments, the AM-FEC protection scheme achieves timely loss recovery for delay-sensitive video streaming and outperforms traditional FEC protection schemes interms of video peak signal-to-noise ratio.