Integration of Error Recovery and Adaptive Playout for Enhanced Multicast Media Streaming

Multicast streaming has been extensively investigated to tackle the network bandwidth challenge. However, the ubiquitous deployment of IP multicast on the Internet is expected only after several years to come due to the manageability and scalability problems. We study a pragmatic solution to enhance the feasibility of multicast media streaming by focusing on an one-to-many streaming over the source specific multicast (SSM) service. In [1], we propose a synchronized multicast media streaming framework employing server-client coordinated adaptive playout. The adaptive playout mechanism controls the playout speed of audio and video by adopting the time-scale modification of audio. Based on the overall synchronization status as well as the buffer occupancy level, the playout speed of each client is manipulated within a perceptually tolerable range. In this work, we are extending the framework to incorporate the error recovery. Each client performs an interactive error recovery with the assistance of adaptive playout. RTCP-compatible signaling between the server and clients is performed, where the cumulative feedback for retransmission (to address the bandwidth restriction on the control messages) is assisted by the adaptive playout. The simulation results demonstrate several enhancements in terms of playout discontinuity and error recovery.