Study of a Practical FEC Scheme for Wireless Data Streaming

FEC (Forward Error Correction) techniques are widely used in streaming data applications. The increasing popularity of streaming over wireless links, however, poses additional challenges because of its high data loss characteristic and the energy/computation limitation of wireless terminals. Consequently, traditional FEC schemes might no longer be suitable. And new FEC scheme is desirable in this context. In this paper, we focus on the EVENODD code to study MDS (Maximum Distance Separable) array codes as a practical FEC scheme. An efficient and versatile decoding algorithm is proposed to enhance the EVENODD code. Compared to two mostly used FEC schemes: the parity code and the Reed-Solomon code, we demonstrate the advantage of the EVENODD code in battling both random and burst data loss, as well as its savings in energy/computation. Both analytical and simulation results show that the EVENODD code is a suitable FEC scheme for wireless data streaming.