A Light-Weight Repair Protocol for the Loss-Free Recording of MBone Sessions

With the increasing popularity of MBone conferences, the need arose to archive the multimedia streams of these conferences. Like all network applications, a conference recorder is subject to packet loss, which introduces gaps into recorded media streams. Such gaps degrade the playback quality of an archived media stream or even disable the correct playback. In this paper, we present a novel scheme for the loss-free recording of media streams. In contrast to existing systems that require the placement of recording caches within the network, our approach enables an end-to-end system design. We present a detailed protocol analysis that confirms the validity of our approach.