Distributed Video Streaming with Forward Error Correction

With the explosive growth of video applications over the Internet, many approaches have been proposed to stream video effectively over packet switched, best-effort networks. Many use techniques from source and channel coding, or implement transport protocols, or modify system architectures in order to deal with delay, loss, and time-varying nature of the Internet. In our previous work , we proposed a framework with a receiver driven protocol to coordinate simultaneous video streaming from multiple senders to a single receiver in order to achieve higher throughput, and to increase tolerance to packet loss and delay due to network congestion. The receiver-driven protocol employs two algorithms: rate allocation and packet partition. The rate allocation algorithm determines the sending rate for each sender; the packet partition algorithm ensures no senders send the same packets, and at the same time, minimizes the probability of late packets. In this paper, we propose a novel rate allocation scheme to be used with Forward Error Correction (FEC) in order to minimize the probability of packet loss in bursty loss environments such as those caused by network congestion. Using both simulations and actual Internet experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our rate allocation scheme in reducing packet loss, and hence, achieving higher visual quality for the streamed video.