Impacts of packet scheduling and packet loss distribution on FEC Performances: observations and recommendations.

ABSTRACTForward Error Correction (FEC) is commonly used for content broadcasting. The performance of the FEC codes largely vary, depending in particular on the code used and on the object size, and these parameters have already been studied in detail by the community. However the FEC performances are also largely dependent on the packet scheduling used during transmission and on the loss pattern introduced by the channel. Little attention has been devoted to these aspects so far. Therefore the present paper analyzes their impacts on the three FEC codes: LDGM Staircase, LDGM Triangle, two large block codes, and Reed-Solomon. Thanks to this analysis, we define several recommendations on how to best use these codes, depending on the test case and on the channel, which turns out to be of utmost importance.