On-the-Fly Coding for Real-Time Applications

Abstract

Although ironically it does not offer any real-time guarantee, Internet is a popular solution to support multimedia time-constrained applications (e.g. VoIP, Video Conferencing, ...). Following this trend, this paper focuses on the performance of these applications by studying the benefit of using a novel reliability concept which aims at signifi- cantly improving the performance of these time constrained applications over lossy best-effort networks. This reliability mechanism emerged from several recent works from both network and coding theories. Its principle is to integrate feedbacks in an on-the fly coding scheme in order to optimize the trade-off ”packet decoding delay” vs ”throughput”. We present the first evaluations of this mechanism for VoIP and video-conferencing applications for various erasure channels. Compared to classic block-based erasure codes, the results show significant gains in terms of quality observed by the user for both applications.