A lost packet recovery technique using convolutional coding in high speed networks

Packet loss due to buffer overflow during congested traffic conditions is expected to be a major source of performance degradation in future high speed networks. Forward error correction can be employed in these networks to improve the end-to-end system performance by reconstructing lost packets at the receiver, thereby avoiding retransmissions. The authors study the feasibility of using convolutional coding for recovering lost packets. They propose a high-speed convolutional decoding technique and demonstrate its applicability in ATM networks at the ATM Adaptation Layer to recover lost packets