Efficient error control for scalable media transmission over 3G broadcast networks

Abstract

Broadcast and mobile phone technologies have now combined to provide wireless multimedia services. 3GPP2 has introduced the Broadcast and Multicast Services (BCMCS) architecture in a 3G wireless network. BCMCS are capable of supplying multimedia content, which requires successive frames to arrive within a specific time interval. We analyze the execution time of Reed-Solomon decoding, which is the MAC-layer forward error correction scheme used in cdma2000 1xEV-DO BCMCS, under different air channel conditions. The results show that the time constraints of MPEG-4 cannot be guaranteed by Reed-Solomon decoding when the packet loss rate (PLR) is high, due to its long computation time on current hardware. To alleviate this problem, we propose three error control schemes. Our static scheme bypasses Reed-Solomon decoding at the mobile node to satisfy the MPEG-4 time constraint when the PLR exceeds a given boundary. Our second, dynamic scheme corrects errors in a best-effort manner within the time constraint, instead of giving up altogether when the PLR is high. The third, video-aware dynamic scheme fixes errors in a similar way to the dynamic scheme, but in a priority-driven manner which improves the quality of the final video. Extensive simulation results show the effectiveness of our schemes compared to the original FEC scheme.