Online multipath convolutional coding for real-time transmission
This work addresses packet loss issues for real-time multimedia streaming applications, representing an incremental improvement over existing FEC-based methods.
The paper tackled the problem of packet loss in real-time multipath streaming by proposing an online multipath convolutional coding scheme based on Tetrys, which consistently outperforms traditional FEC methods in both uniform and burst loss scenarios, with improvements in packet recovery performance.
Most of multipath multimedia streaming proposals use Forward Error Correction (FEC) approach to protect from packet losses. However, FEC does not sustain well burst of losses even when packets from a given FEC block are spread over multiple paths. In this article, we propose an online multipath convolutional coding for real-time multipath streaming based on an on-the-fly coding scheme called Tetrys. We evaluate the benefits brought out by this coding scheme inside an existing FEC multipath load splitting proposal known as Encoded Multipath Streaming (EMS). We demonstrate that Tetrys consistently outperforms FEC in both uniform and burst losses with EMS scheme. We also propose a modification of the standard EMS algorithm that greatly improves the performance in terms of packet recovery. Finally, we analyze different spreading policies of the Tetrys redundancy traffic between available paths and observe that the longer propagation delay path should be preferably used to carry repair packets.