An error control scheme for multicast communications over an ATM network

ATM-based transmission systems suffer from cell losses, caused particularly by congestion, which can seriously degrade the transmission quality. Forward error correction (FEC) techniques have been proposed for cell loss recovery but are still limited because congestion cell loss is hard to predict meaningfully. We propose a protocol based on an adaptive forward error correction (AFEC) mechanism. The protocol has been designed especially for minimizing the effect of transmission delays, and to fulfil the delay constraints of services to be provided. The proposed coding is examined for point-to-multipoint communications, and handles cells rather than messages to increase the efficiency