Forward Error Correction in Real-time Video Streaming Applications

Abstract: The Internet is rapidly becoming the dominant platform for video contribution and distribution, but today’s Internet provides a best-effort service without any guarantee of quality. Internet video streaming has to cope with this lack of guarantees. Due to congestion and the heterogeneous infrastructure of the Internet a video transmission will be plagued by packet loss, variability in throughput, and latency. To mitigate some of these these problems f.o.r.w.a.r.d e.r.r.o.r c.o.r.r.e.c.t.i.o.n (F.E.C) can be employed. The aim of this thesis is to present a theoretical introduction to error correcting codes, implement and integrate f.o.r.w.a.r.d e.r.r.o.r c.o.r.r.e.c.t.i.o.n into an existing video streaming application, and test the implementation in both simulated and real-world conditions. Parameters of the F.E.C algorithm will be tweaked and guidelines for parameter selection will be developed