Analysis of Consecutive Block-Loss for Streaming Services

This paper considers the characteristics of consecutive block loss for streaming services in which a block for a streaming service consists of original data packets and redundant ones generated by forward error correction (FEC). We consider a single-server queueing system with two input processes: a general renewal input process and a Poisson one. The former represents a streaming-packet flow, while the latter is for background traffic multiplexed at the queue. We investigate the dynamics of the system state during the interval from the arrival epoch of the first packet of the block to that of the last one, deriving the block-loss run distribution, i.e., the probability distribution of the number of consecutive block losses. The analytical model is validated by trace-driven simulation experiments. Numerical examples show that the moments of the distribution are significantly affected by the volume of background traffic and the FEC redundancy, rather than the system capacity.