An Explicit Rate-Optimal Streaming Code for Channels with Burst and Arbitrary Erasures

In this paper, we consider transmitting a sequence of messages (a streaming source) over a packet erasure channel, where every source message must be recovered perfectly at the destination subject to a fixed decoding delay. Recently, the capacity of such a channel was established. However, the codes shown to achieve the capacity are either non-explicit constructions (proven to exist) or explicit constructions requiring large field size that scales exponentially with the delay. This work presents an explicit rate-optimal construction for all channel and delay parameters over a field size that scales only quadratically with the delay.