Video Quality in Transmission over Burst-Loss Channels: A Forward Error Correction Perspective

We evaluate the impact of forward error correction (FEC) coding on the end-to-end video quality of video communications over burst-loss channels. We formulate the probability of a given packet loss pattern and the associated video distortion such that we can compute the expected distortion for the video signal after FEC recovery at the receiver. Using our analytical model, we compute the expected video quality in the case of transmission over different Markov channels, both in the presence or absence of FEC. These results match with high accuracy actual simulation-obtained data thereby validating the proposed analysis.