Packet Loss Recovery Scheme with Uniquely-Decodable Codes for Streaming Multimedia over P2P Networks

This paper presents an effective packet loss recovery scheme for Internet Protocol (IP) based peer-to-pear (P2P) networks that deliver multimedia streaming contents. The proposed scheme consists of two key components, a packet forward error correction (FEC) scheme and a uniquely decodable coding (UDC) scheme. The FEC scheme is devised to recover network packet loss over the transport layer to improve link transmission reliability at the user-ends of the P2P networks. The UDC scheme is employed to allow multiple sources to transmit data streams simultaneously in such a way that the combined data streams can be separated uniquely without ambiguity at the user-ends. This simultaneous multiple sources data transmission increases the throughput at the user-ends. Theoretical analysis and computer simulations show that the proposed scheme can achieve the commonly acceptable of 10^{-6} end-to-end packet loss rate for input packet loss rate of up to 10%with a reasonably small bandwidth expansion factor, while maintains a high throughput at the user-ends.