A Partially Reliable Transport Protocol for Multiple-Description Real-Time Multimedia Traffic

Multiple description coding (MDC) combined with multi-path transmission is a viable solution to the growing demand of reliable multimedia video communication over the Internet. Despite the progress in MDC techniques, transport protocols based on TCP cannot efficiently handle multipath transmissions of this kind of traffic. In this paper we present MD-SCTP, a full-multipath partially-reliable SCTP-based protocol, providing different scheduling schemes and featuring a selective retransmission within time-to-delivery constraints of multimedia traffic. Performance analysis proves the validity of our scheduler and of our selective retransmission scheme.