End-to-end robust IP soft handover

We describe the design and implementation of a new transport layer protocol, MMSP (mobile multimedia streaming protocol), that supports bicasting in combination with FEC. MMSP duplicates the packets to be sent through the creation of redundant packets that are Reed-Solomon coded and sends them through two different paths to avoid data loss during handover. We call this mechanism end-to-end robust IP soft handover; it enables mobile terminals to move without any data loss and also improves error resiliency against wireless errors. Thus it is well suited to many common real-time multimedia applications for which retransmission is inappropriate. Our architecture requires no changes to the existing IP networks so it allows for easy deployment. Our performance experiments show that while FEC processing causes some slight delay, such delay is allowable. Bicasting with FEC can provide high quality MPEG-4 transport even under high bit error rates.