An experimental study of adaptive forward error correction for wireless collaborative computing

This paper describes an experimental study of a proxy service to support collaboration among mobile users. Specifically, the paper addresses the problem of reliably multicasting Web resources across wireless local area networks, whose loss characteristics can be highly variable. The software architecture of the proxy service is described, followed by results of a performance study conducted on a mobile computing testbed. The main contribution of the paper is to show that an adaptive forward error correction mechanism, which adjusts the level of redundancy in response to packet loss behavior, can quickly accommodate worsening channel characteristics in order to reduce delay and increase throughput for reliable multicast channels.