Performance evaluation of forward error correction in an ATM environment

The loss behavior of a cell multiplexer and the performance of forward error correction (FEC) for two homogeneous and one heterogeneous traffic scenarios are discussed. The loss behavior depends on the statistics of the source and on the traffic scenario. Simulation results indicate that the percentage of cells lost in a block is geometrically distributed. Using these results a mathematical model for the performance of FEC is developed, and the effectiveness of FEC for the three traffic scenarios is computed. It is shown that FEC is not effective for the two homogeneous scenarios. However, FEC reduces the loss rate for the video sources by several orders of magnitude for a heterogeneous scenario consisting of video and burst sources