For real time multimedia signal transmission in wireless channel, the effect of packets lost due to error and due to congestion, end-to-end delay during the transmission which in-turn will affect the parameters of wireless channel like reliability, quality of service (QoS); transmission rate, transmission delay etc. are required to be considered. Most of the real-time applications uses user datagram protocol (UDP) as their transport protocol. For better end-to-end performance of wireless network, improvements are required in the existing protocol of physical (PHY) layer. This paper surveys the literature on real time communication over wireless and suggests adaptive error control mechanism for reliable transmission. The suggested adaptive forward error control (AFEC) method results in achieving the desired recovery rate at the receiver without using any retransmission mechanism. The network simulator NS-2 is used to evaluate the same. The simulation results indicate that the suggested method improves end-to-end performance by increased packet delivery ratio (PDR) by reducing end to end delay for real time multimedia signal in the wireless network. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media.