Impacts of the Packet Scheduling on the Performance of Certain Erasure Codes: Methodology and Application to GLDPC-Staircase

Content broadcasting over wireless networks heavily relies on Application-Level FEC codes to improve transmission robustness in front of channel impairments. Because they operate in the higher layers of the protocol stack, on an erasure channel, they benefit from a lot of flexibility. In particular, since streaming applications and bulk transfer applications have different constraints, it justifies that different packet schedules be used, hence the new question: what are the impacts of the packet scheduling on AL-FEC performance? This work has two contributions: first it defines a methodology to measure the impacts of packet scheduling on AL-FEC codes, both under ITerative (IT) and Maximum Likelihood (ML) decoding, for a large set of channels; then it applies this methodology on GLDPC-Staircase codes, an extension of LDPC-Staircase codes using Reed Solomon codes as inner codes. In previous works we showed that these codes have erasure recovery performance close to ideals codes when packets are transmitted in a random order. In this work we show that these codes perform extremely well when sending source packets sequentially first (a key requirement with streaming applications from a latency viewpoint), and then extra-repair packet followed by repair packets, both in a random order