Delay-Optimal Burst Erasure Codes for Parallel Links

Motivated by live streaming applications using peer assistance, we study burst erasure correction codes with optimal decoding delay for parallel-link networks. We consider a new model for network error correction, where each source symbol is decoded at the sink on-the-fly with a strict decoding deadline. We distinguish two types of errors which have very different implications on the code design - erasure burst and link outage. For a class of codes that achieve the Singleton bound, we state a theorem that characterizes the fundamental tradeoff among the coding rate, decoding delay and error correction performance, whose achievability is illustrated by a practical code construction.