On-the-fly erasure coding for real-time video applications

TL;DR

This paper presents Tetrys, an on-the-fly erasure coding scheme that significantly reduces packet recovery delay, enabling real-time video applications to achieve higher reliability and quality without delay penalties.

Contribution

The paper introduces Tetrys, a novel on-the-fly erasure coding method that improves packet recovery times and enhances real-time application performance over lossy networks.

Findings

Tetrys can recover lost packets below one RTT in lossy networks.

Tetrys enables full reliability without increasing delay.

Video conferencing shows up to 7dB PSNR gain with Tetrys.

Abstract

This paper introduces a robust point-to-point transmission scheme: Tetrys, that relies on a novel on-the-fly erasure coding concept which reduces the delay for recovering lost data at the receiver side. In current erasure coding schemes, the packets that are not rebuilt at the receiver side are either lost or delayed by at least one RTT before transmission to the application. The present contribution aims at demonstrating that Tetrys coding scheme can fill the gap between real-time applications requirements and full reliability. Indeed, we show that in several cases, Tetrys can recover lost packets below one RTT over lossy and best-effort networks. We also show that Tetrys allows to enable full reliability without delay compromise and as a result: significantly improves the performance of time constrained applications. For instance, our evaluations present that video-conferencing applications obtain a PSNR gain up to 7dB compared to classic block-based erasure codes.