Quality of experience in multicast hybrid networks: avoiding bandwidth wasting with a double-stage FEC scheme

Quality of experience is becoming an important parameter for estimating the end user perceived video quality. Video coding algorithms are currently increasing the compression performances by exploiting the temporal and spatial correlations of multimedia information. Such a trend is self-defeating in hybrid networks, due to the frequent channel impairments experienced. Here, the authors present a double-stage forward error correction (FEC) scheme to reduce the channel impairments that a multimedia communication undergoes when broadcasting a video stream through an hybrid infrastructure constituted by satellite and terrestrial wireless links. The authors present a detailed statistical description of the terrestrial wireless channel and exploit it to design the parameters for tuning the algorithm. Simulations results show that this approach not only performs better than the error recovery techniques currently used in the literature, but it also experiences a significant reduction in the bandwidth overhead.