Packet-loss resilient coding scheme with only XOR operations

Application of forward error correction to recover lost packets in higher layers of communication networks is receiving increasing attention. Most of the previous proposals for packet loss recovery use symbol-oriented Reed-Solomon codes operating in symbol erasure-correction mode. A Reed-Solomon code is optimal in the sense that it is maximal distance separable; however, the decoding speed of a Reed-Solomon code is slow since it involves operations over GF(2^m) using lookup tables. A packet-oriented (n, k)/(m, l) packet-loss resilient code based on an (n, k) Reed-Solomon code over GF(2^m) is given. The code accepts k-packet information sequences and encodes them into n-packet codewords, where each packet consists of m l-bit tuples with l an arbitrary positive integer. The code is designed for efficient operation in software implementations. By letting l be a multiple of the size of the words of the underlying computer, almost all of the decoding operations are XORs of the computer words. Simulation results indicate that the decoding speed of the code is 10-30 times faster than that of the symbol-oriented Reed-Solomon code.