Performance analysis of a high-performance real-time application with several AL-FEC schemes

Real-time streaming applications typically require minimizing packet loss and transmission delay so as to keep the best possible playback quality. From this point of view, IP datagram losses (e.g. caused by a congested router, or caused by a short term fading problem with wireless transmissions) have major negative impacts. Although Application Layer Forward Error Correction (AL-FEC) is a useful technique for protecting against packet loss, the playback quality is largely sensitive to the AL-FEC code/codec features and the way they are used. In this work, we consider three FEC schemes for the erasure channel: 2D parity check codes, Reed-Solomon over GF(2⁸) codes, and LDPC-Staircase codes, all of them being currently standardized within IETF. We have integrated these FEC schemes in the FECFRAME framework, a framework that is also being standardized at IETF, and whose goal is to integrate AL-FEC schemes in real-time protocol stacks in a simple and flexible way. Then we modified the Digital Video Transport System (DVTS) high-performance real-time video streaming application so that it can benefit from FECFRAME in order to recover from transmission impairments. We then carried out several performance evaluations in order to identify, for a given loss rate, the optimal configuration in which DVTS performs the best.