Erasure Coding and Congestion Control for Interactive Real-Time Communication

TL;DR

This paper discusses integrating erasure coding schemes into multimedia congestion control protocols like TFRC to improve real-time communication quality over the Internet, which currently relies on best-effort service and faces challenges with delay and packet loss.

Contribution

It proposes incorporating erasure coding into congestion control protocols to enhance reliability and quality in real-time multimedia applications.

Findings

Erasure coding can mitigate packet loss effects in real-time communication.

Integrating coding schemes into congestion control improves video quality under variable network conditions.

Highlights the need for new protocols for reliable real-time multimedia transmission.

Abstract

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.