Adaptive FEC Technique for Multimedia Applications Over the Internet

Forward Error Correction (FEC) is a common technique for transmitting multimedia streams over the Internet. In this paper we propose a new approach of adaptive FEC scheme for multimedia applications over the Internet. This adaptive FEC will optimize the redundancy of the generated codewords from a Reed-Solomon (RS) encoder, in–order to save the bandwidth of the channel. The adaptation of the FEC scheme is based on predefined probability equations, which are derived from the data loss rates related to the recovery rates at the clients. The server uses the RTCP reports from clients and the probability equations to approximate the final delivery ratio of the sent packets to the client after applying the adaptive FEC. The server uses the RTCP reports also to predict the next network loss rate using curve fitting technique to generate the optimized redundancy in-order to meet certain residual error rates at the clients.