Heuristics for Jointly Optimizing FEC and ARQ for Video Streaming over IEEE802.11 WLAN

In this paper, the problem of selecting an appropriate number of forward error correction (FEC) packets under given channel and network conditions is formulated as an optimization problem and two heuristic algorithms are proposed to find the solution. These heuristic algorithms are used for selecting the parameters of FEC scheme under a given maximum number of automatic repeat request (ARQ) retries, to achieve higher visual quality and efficient transport of multimedia applications over an IEEE 802.11 wireless channel. The proposed algorithms are: adaptive linear FEC (ALFEC) and adaptive exponential FEC (AEFEC), where the number of FEC packets respectively decreases linearly and exponentially, as the sender´s queue increases. Simulated performance of the proposed algorithms is compared against those for the existing static and dynamic FEC generation schemes. It is found that the proposed heuristic algorithms outperform the other existing schemes in terms of system efficiency and provides comparable peak-signal-to-noise-ratio (PSNR) gain.