MA-FEC: A QoS-based adaptive FEC for multicast communication in wireless networks

Wireless channels are highly affected by unpredictable factors such as cochannel interference, adjacent channel interference, propagation path loss, shadowing and multipath fading. The unreliability of media degrades the transmission quality seriously. Forward Error Correction (FEC) schemes are frequently used in wireless environments to reduce the high bit error rate of the channel. In this paper, we propose an adaptive FEC scheme for multicast communication in wireless networks based on dynamic variation of coding parameters as a function of the channel bit error rate, desired QoS in terms of reliability, number of receivers and efficiency in terms of bandwidth use. Reed-Solomon erasure codes are used throughout this study because of their appropriate characteristics in terms of powerful coding and implementation simplicity. We make a numerical analysis of a set of Reed-Solomon erasure codes. The observations made throughout this numerical analysis are the basic principals of our adaptive FEC scheme. Numerical results show that our adaptive scheme provides the best trade-off between transmission overhead and guaranteed QoS.