A scalable and reliable hybrid scheme for image multicast applications

In real-time multicast communication scalability, reliability, and feedback implosion are of paramount importance. In this work we have developed an efficient feedback-free, entirely receiver-driven, and reliable visual information delivery hybrid scheme (SIGMA-EC) for multicast applications over unreliable communication networks, that requires no per-receiver status at the sender. Efficient bandwidth utilization is achieved by transmitting the parity packets over separate multicast channels, which receivers dynamically join and leave, preventing unnecessary receiver processing overhead and storage requirements for those packets that have already received correctly, and giving rise to a tradeoff between bandwidth and quality. Our XOR-based scheme's encoding and decoding processing time is an order of magnitude faster than conventional RS-based loss recovery schemes. Furthermore, we obtain all these advantages using a remarkably simple structure, both conceptually as well as computationally.