ICST: Low-delay forward error correction scheme with interleaved coding and sequential transmission

Abstract

Burst packet loss problem is a common phenomenon over wired and wireless networks. Forward error correction (FEC) mechanism generally aims to recover the lost packets during transmission, but the performance of FEC degrades in the presence of burst packet loss. The traditional FEC interleaving mechanism sequentially encodes FEC packets and reorders the packet transmission sequence in such a way that the burst loss effect can be mitigated with the cost of increased delay. This paper presents a novel FEC interleaving mechanism to reduce the long interleaving delay while maintaining the performance enhancement provided by the interleaving technique. Specifically, the proposed mechanism, namely interleaving-coding-sequential-transmission (ICST) FEC, rearranges the sequence of FEC coding in an interleaved manner, and transmits packets sequentially in accordance with their generation order in the application.