Efficient FEC Codes for Data Loss Recovery

Real-time applications are becoming more and more popular and important. To address the specific needs, such as data loss and transmission delay, of these applications, FEC (Forward Error Correction) techniques based on error correcting codes are widely used. The choice of codes and their parameters are crucial in determining the efficiency of FEC, in terms of loss recovery capability, bandwidth use and computation complexity. The parity code and the Reed-Solomon code are two classes of error correcting codes widely used for FEC. The former, however, is limited by loss recovery capability while the later is limited by computation complexity. In this paper, we propose to study MDS (Maximum Distance Separable) array codes as FEC codes. Especially, we study the suitability of the EVENODD code for both random and bursty data loss recovery. We also propose an efficient and versatile decoding algorithm for the EVENODD code that is suitable to correct both random and bursty losses. Our analytical and simulation results show that the EVENODD code with our decoding algorithm is more efficient and effective to combat most data loss patterns and is therefore very suitable to be used as an FEC code in a wide range of environments.