Reliable, Server-Friendly and Bandwidth-Efficient File Delivery System using FLUTE Server File Format

The use of Forward Error Correction (FEC) codes is a classical solution to improve the reliability of multicast and broadcast transmissions in a packet erasure channel. However, FEC encoding on-the-fly increases the load of the server and it may decrease the overall performance of the file delivery system. This paper presents a reliable, server-friendly and bandwidth-efficient file delivery system using the server file format for File Delivery over Unidirectional Transport (FLUTE) protocol. The FLUTE server file format enables storage of pre-composed source symbols and pre-calculated FEC symbols into a media container file, so there is no need to source symbol construction and FEC encoding on-the-fly. Additionally, the actual transmission is controlled by file delivery hint tracks containing cookbook instructions that ease the encapsulation of source and FEC symbols into a transmittable packet stream.