Reliable Data Transport Protocol with FEC Mechanism for Erasure Channels

Multimedia services generate an important part of the Internet traffic and the request for such services is increasing continuously. The characteristics of these services and their QoS requirements generate new challenges for the communication protocols. In order to cope with heavy congestions and the feedback implosion phenomenon Forward Error Correction (FEC) mechanisms were integrated into protocols controlling content distribution services and network coding techniques were proposed for peer-to-peer communications. The paper proposes a data transport protocol with integrated FEC mechanism intended to control the transmission between gateway nodes. The gateway level implementation allows protecting aggregated flows against packet drops generated by congestions and channel erasures. The proposed FEC enhanced data transport mechanism is combined with multipath transmissions between gateways, being exploited the diversity offered by such transmissions. A prototype protocol was implemented and experimentally evaluated on simulated transmission channels. The performance improvements of the proposed protocol in terms of packet erasure rate and jitter observed after decoding was demonstrated.