A transport level unequal error protection mechanism for wireless interactive video

We propose an end-to-end unequal error protection mechanism for interactive video in wireless networks by extending retransmission-based error control with redundant retransmissions on diverse paths between the sender and receiver. The mechanism factors in the importance of the packets as well as the end-to-end latency constraints to minimize the overhead and maximize the quality at the receiver. We implemented the mechanism as a reliability mode extension to load sharing-stream control transmission protocol (LS-SCTP) to leverage its support for simultaneous transmission of data on multiple paths as well as other useful features for media streaming. We refer to the reliability mode as reliability mode load sharing-SCTP (RLS-SCTP). Simulation results show that RLS-SCTP can significantly increase the robustness of video transmission in wireless networks, such as in future combat systems (FCS) networks, with less overhead compared to mechanisms that depend on reference frame updates.