Unequal and interleaved FEC protocol for robust MPEG-4 multicasting over wireless LANs

Robust video streaming over wireless local area networks (IEEE 802.11) faces many challenges, including bandwidth channel variations, data errors/losses, and terminal capacity heterogeneity. This is worsen by the TCP/IP architecture that does not offer any quality of service QoS guarantees to demanding applications such as video streaming. In order to improve error resilience and user-perceived video quality, a novel error control protocol, called "unequally interleaved forward error correction" (UI-FEC), is proposed. UI-FEC is particularly efficient for adaptive MPEG-4 video multicast over wireless LAN. The proposed protocol is composed of (1) a coordinated unequal and interleaved MPEG-4 data protection mechanism, that gracefully degrades video quality at receivers while minimizing the overall link bandwidth consumption; (2) an adaptive MPEG-4 video fragmentation and encapsulation protocol for a higher wireless link utilization.