On the potential of FEC algorithms in building fault-tolerant distributed applications to support high QoS video communications

Studies for distributed applications have demonstrated that application quality in distributed computing is strongly dependent on the qualityof the underlyingcommunicationsystem.Besidea performance characteristics the reliability properties of a communication system are playing a predominant role with regard to the qurdky achievable from applications’ point of view. In this paper we study distributed applications with video communication via 10SSYcommunication systems. We develop analytical models reflecting transmission of MPEG coded video streams both without and with forward error correction (FEC). These models allow us to determine the optimum amountof redundancyto be used for PEC when communicating via constant bit rate connections. We conclude that FEC algorithms offer the potentiat for high qrsalityof-service even in the case of using a communication system with low quality.