FEC and priority for VBR video distribution over ATM

This paper concerns the distribution of entertainment quality video by means of asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) over optical fibre to the home or curb using a variable bit rate (VBR) video coder with a modest degree of compression. The encoder generates data of two levels of value or priority with respect to the reconstruction process. The paper focuses on the final ATM link to the home and investigates the use of a cell-loss compensation scheme using forward error correcting (FEC) codes to reconstruct lost cells containing high value video data. As well as the use of priority with respect to cell-discard in the ATM multiplexer. Performance evaluation of the cell-loss compensation, multiplexing and priority schemes shows that the use of FEC is of limited value, with or without priority, but that priority alone can significantly improve performance with regard to quality and traffic handling capacity