A Study on Packet Loss Recovery Techniques for the Streaming Media over Packet Networks

Media streaming over packet networks such as the Internet are increasingly becoming popular with the development of the broadband networks. These streaming media require a higher quality of service (QoS) compared to non real time media such as E-mail The main factor that degrades the QoS of streaming media is packet losses, and Forward Error Correction (FEC) is promising technique to recover them and improve QoS of streaming media. Therefore, the general objective of this dissertation is to provide packet loss recovery techniques based on FEC over packet networks in order to improve the QoS of streaming media. Streaming media can be categorized into live and on-demand types. First, an efficient FEC matrix structure is proposed to recover bursty packet losses for live streaming media. The proposed matrix structure combines different FEC matrices with the small matrix size and changes the loss-recovery ability dynamically according to the network congestion without deterioration of the data transmission efficiency. It can improve both packet loss ratio and data transmission efficiency compared to conventional FEC methods. Performance of the proposed method is evaluated and compared to the conventional methods. Second, the issues of adverse effects of FEC overheads are addressed and analyzed. The results show FEC overheads degrade QoS of streaming media with increase of the number of streaming sessions. In order to solve this problem, a novel packet loss recovery technique suitable for on-demand streaming media is proposed. It separates the FEC packets from the original media packets and creates the FEC content consisting of the FEC packets. Then, it sends the FEC content to the receiver end using TCP before media streaming starts. Thus, this method can minimize the adverse effects of FEC overheads and can efficiently recover packet losses for on-demand streaming media. Performance of the proposed method is evaluated and compared to the conventional methods. Finally, distributed routing architecture to maintain streaming media quality is proposed to recover big bursty losses. Generally, when network failures or heavily congestions occur, rerouting is done in a network domain to cope with them. However, re-routing always cause packet losses and highly degrades QoS of streaming media. These losses are big bursty and therefore, even the FEC matrix structure cannot recover them. In order to solve this, the proposed method distributes media and FEC packets among some transmission routes. Therefore, it can recover the big busty losses due to re-routing and provide network architecture with no service outage for streaming media. Performance of the proposed method is evaluated and compared to the conventional methods.