An Efficient and Scalable Loss Recovery Scheme For Video Multicast

Abstract — With the increased popularity of multimedia services on the Internet, efficient video multicast strategies that can scale easily are of critical importance. This paper addresses the issue of video multicast loss recovery and presents an efficient and scalable scheme: Active Injection Recovery (AIR). The proposed scheme has three distinguishing features: active injection of repair packets into loss regions, on-demand construction of loss recovery structures, and unique rate control over repair traffic. All these features can save considerable network resources in a large-scale video multicast session. In addition, the proposed scheme simultaneously meets the three well-known requirements for efficiency and scalability in multicast loss recovery: request suppression, local recovery, and retransmission scoping. Another important feature of the proposed scheme is its low recovery latency, which is essential for video multicast. Our analysis shows that the proposed scheme achieves significantly better overall performance as compared to existing multicast loss recovery schemes. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can improve the video quality considerably in a streaming video multicast session. Keywords: Algorithm/protocol design and analysis I