IQCM: a robust and efficient multimedia data recovery mechanism

Despite the increasing popularity of the Internet as a communications medium, the bulk of its traffic is still made up of non-multimedia data. The best effort nature of the current Internet Protocol (IPv4) does not provide any quality of service (QoS) guarantees for high bandwidth applications such as real-time multimedia transmission, which have severe constraints on bandwidth, packet loss and delay. We describe current QoS control mechanisms and propose an integrated QoS control mechanism (IQCM). IQCM is a 5-stage mechanism that performs network congestion control, forward error correction (FEC) and error-resilient coding. To support generic data, our focus is primarily on the transport layer rather than compression semantics. IQCM may be used to support multimedia data delivery over the Internet, such as Web-based video-on-demand systems. Experimental results have validated IQCM's ability to control packet loss rates and enhance the quality of multimedia play-out.