An efficient loss recovery scheme for on-demand video streaming over the internet

Streaming services over the Internet are expected to grow rapidly in the near future. However, packet losses caused by buffer overflow at routers are a serious problem in these services, and are responsible for degradation of the Quality of Service (QoS). Forward error correction (FEC) is a promising technique to recover the lost packets and improve the QoS of streaming media. However, if FEC is applied for whole bandwidth between nodes, it may degrade the QoS of all communications due to the increased congestion caused by FEC overhead. In this paper, a novel FEC method that sends all FEC contents to the receiver end before media streaming starts is proposed. Thus, it avoids the increased congestion caused by FEC overhead during media streaming. Also, low priorities are given to some of the media packets at the sender end, considering the FEC recovery ability and video encoding method of MPEG-2. A simple algorithm of priority-based packet discarding at the routers avoids buffer overflows. The results of computer simulations show that the packet loss ratio of proposed method is highly improved compared to the conventional method even for highly congested networks.