A File Aggregation Scheme for FLUTE

This document introduces a logical and physical file aggregation scheme for File Delivery over Unidirectional Transport (FLUTE). The logical file aggregation mechanism is a generalized grouping mechanism, allowing to logically group files. The physical file aggregation scheme allows, additionally to a logical grouping, to more efficiently use Forward Error Correction (FEC) in the context of FLUTE, in particular when dealing with a large number of "small" files. Unlike a solution based on the creation of an archive, the object aggregation scheme (1) avoids the need to perform preliminary transformations on the content and (2) preserves the possibility to extract a subset of the content, which may be critical aspect with some partially reliable broadcasting test cases