Erasure Coding and Congestion Control for Interactive Real-Time Communication
This work tackles the problem of improving video quality for real-time multimedia applications over best-effort Internet, but it is a position paper, so it is incremental and primarily motivational.
The paper addresses the challenge of real-time communication over the Internet, where variable sending rates and packet losses degrade video quality due to the lack of retransmission options, and proposes integrating erasure coding into congestion control protocols like TFRC to mitigate these issues.
The use of real-time applications over the Internet is a challenging problem that the QoS epoch attempted to solve by proposing the DiffServ architecture. Today, the only existing service provided by the Internet is still best-effort. As a result, multimedia applications often perform on top of a transport layer that provides a variable sending rate. In an obvious manner, this variable sending rate is an issue for these applications with strong delay constraint. In a real-time context where retransmission can not be used to ensure reliability, video quality suffers from any packet losses. In this position paper, we discuss this problem and motivate why we want to bring out a certain class of erasure coding scheme inside multimedia congestion control protocols such as TFRC.