Performance evaluation of AL-FEC LDPC codes for push content applications in wireless unidirectional environments

FEC (Forward Error Correction) mechanisms improve IP content transmission reliability through the recovery of packets lost in transmission. Opposite to ARQ (Automatic Repeat Request), FEC mechanisms are especially suited to unidirectional environments or to multicast environments where multiple receivers perceived different channel losses, thus making difficult the implementation of mechanisms based on feedback information. Among the different types of FEC codes, this paper presents a thorough performance evaluation of LDPC (Low Density Parity Check) codes, based on an implementation developed by the authors, according to the specifications defined by RFC 5170 for the usage of LDPC codes by push content applications based on the FLUTE protocol. LDPC codes provide a good trade-off between performance and complexity, hence, they are appropriate for mobile applications. Contributions of this paper include tests conducted with commercial mobile phones connected to the push content download server over a Wi-Fi network. The evaluation highlights the advantages of using packet level FEC encoding in file transmission over unidirectional networks and provides with a comparison between two kinds of LDPC structures: Staircase and Triangle. This is accomplished by calculating the inefficiency ratio of these LDPC structures in different environments. Results show that the implemented LDPC codes can provide inefficiency ratios close to one when the different coding parameters (as the code rate or the number of blocks) are configured to an optimal value that depends on the packet loss rate.