Proactive Retransmission and Buffer Management for Layered Video Transmission over Wireless Channel

Abstract

Hybrid FEC/ARQ, which is a mixture of forward error correction (FEC) and automatic repeat request (ARQ), is a well-known technique aiming for packet-loss recovery to guarantee quality of service (QoS) for real-time communications. In this paper, focusing on layered video transmission over wireless network environment, we propose a proactive retransmission scheme for hybrid FEC/ARQ. In the proposed scheme, a receiver host periodically sends probe packets to a sender host in order to check wireless channel state. If the sender host does not receive any probe packet during a pre-specified interval, it regards the wireless channel as being in burst loss state, and it proactively retransmits packets expected to be lost during the burst loss period. The buffer management associated with layered video coding is also taken into consideration. The performance of the proposed scheme is investigated by simulation. Numerical examples show that the proposed scheme transmits packets of the base layer more successfully than the conventional FEC/ARQ.