Performance evaluation of Raptor and Random Linear Codes for H.264/AVC video transmission over DVB-H networks

Application Layer Forward Error Correction (AL)-FEC is increasingly being employed in the emerging wireless multimedia applications, where the multimedia data is sent along with repair data that can be used at the receiver to recover any losses. Raptor codes and Random Linear Codes (RLC) have emerged as promising rateless coding solutions. The DVB-H standard has adopted Raptor codes for IP datacasting, whereas for real-time communications, Reed-Solomon (RS) codes are used as link-layer FEC. This study compares the performance of Raptor codes and RLC for sending the H.264/AVC compressed video traffic over the DVB-H network. The simulations are performed using error traces depicting physical-layer Transport Stream (TS) packet losses in DVB-H. The study highlights the possibility of using RLC for the AL-FEC by selectively configuring codes for optimum performance.