Survey on the Application of Forward Error Correction Coding in Network Transmission Protocols

Abstract

Forward error correction (FEC) coding is a technique to cope with packet loss in network transmission.By adding redundant data to the transmission process,the receiver can recover the original data directly from the redundant data in packet loss scenarios.In the scenario of high packet loss and high latency,adding forward error correction coding appropriately can save a lot of waiting time for timeout retransmission to improve the quality of service of network transmission.Adding too much redundancy will result in bandwidth wasting,while insufficient redundancy will fail to recover lost data,so the difficulty of using forward error correction coding in practice is to properly control the proportion of redundant data.Nowadays,most of the forward error correction coding research is based on traditional network protocols,but with the rise of QUIC (quick UDP internet connections) protocol,more forward error correction researches start to incorporate QUIC protocol due to its characters like 0-RTT (round trip time) connectivity,multiplexing,seamless connection migration to further improve transmission performance.This paper gives an overview of forward error correction coding,introduces its application scenarios,basic policies and adaptive redundancy control strategies.Then it introduces the research status of forward error correcting coding in traditional protocols in unicast and multicast scenarios.Finally,this paper introduces the current research status and challenges of forward error correction coding in QUIC protocol.

Keywords

• quic protocol|tcp protocol|forward error correction coding|adaptive redundancy|performance measurement