Comparison of Two Forward Error Correction Approaches for Packet Protection in HDTV with Variable Bit Rate Transmission

Abstract

We examine the efficiency of two FEC strategies for the protection of HDTV video packets transmitted at variable bit rate. The first FEC strategy pursues packet protection by means of a fixed Reed-Solomon code. The second strategy encodes a set of packets within a fixed time frame resulting in Reed-Solomon codes of variable length. We quantify the performance of both strategies for a representative movie where the HDTV video packets are transmitted at variable bit rate over a channel that is subjected to independent errors and error bursts.