Evaluation of AFEC for Multicast Video Streaming Over Wireless Network

Abstract

Social Networking like WhatsApp application is popular media for communication in today's world. These applications are based on multicast and broadcast communication. Multicast communication provides access control over selected users and governs the communication within their own space. This is an example of group based communication paradigm. Quality of multicast communication in wireless networks depends on various issues like scalability, channel allocation and error control. Most part of data used between the groups includes video and multimedia data. Hence multicasting of video streams over wireless network requires significantly diverse error control approach from those used in wired computer networks. Authors discuss the Adaptive Forward Error Correction (AFEC) algorithm for streaming the video efficiently over multicast wireless network. AFEC adjusts the level of redundancy packets depending on the state of network. Thus this algorithm uses the redundancy packets for error control in the wireless network. AFEC decreases the redundancy when throughput is high at receiver side and increases the redundancy when receiver has low throughput to correct the error in communication. Network Loss Ratio (NLR) is used to estimate the packet loss probability and it influences the AFEC decision of redundancy. Network simulator NS2 is used to implement the AFEC algorithm to control the error in multicast video streaming. Results show that AFEC consumes less bandwidth than conventional FEC algorithm.