An adaptive multiple retransmission technique for continuous media streams

ABSTRACT

Retransmission can be used for loss recovery in continuous media applications but the number of retransmission attempts is bounded by the size of the playout buffer. For efficient recovery, a protocol must attempt as many retransmissions as possible but avoid late retransmissions. This typically requires that the playout buffer be sized in round-trip time (RTT) multiples plus some margin for error. RTT-based timers are then used to trigger retransmissions. However, this approach is problematic due to (i) the high variation in RTT commonly encountered in the Internet, and (ii) the coarse granularity of timers typically used in protocol implementations.We present two new retransmission-based protocols, for unicast and multicast respectively, which eliminate RTT estimation and timer-triggered events. As a result, our protocols are immune to errors due to RTT jitter and timer granularity and recover more losses, while better suppressing unnecessary retransmission requests and retransmissions than timer-based protocols. At the same time, our protocols are simpler to implement and degrade more gracefully than timer-based protocols.

REFERENCES

• 1: S. Lin, D. J. Costello Jr. and M. J. Miller. Automatic-Repeat-Request Error-Control Schemes. IEEE Communications Magazine, vol. 22, no. 12, December 1984.
• 2: C. Papadopoulos and G. M. Parulkar. Retransmission-based Error Control for Continuous Media Applications. Proc. 6th International Workshop on Network and Operating Systems Support for Digital Audio and Video (NOSSDAV), April 1996.
• 3: Yin Zhang , Nick Duffield, On the constancy of internet path properties, Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Internet Measurement, November 01-02, 2001, San Francisco, California, USA [doi>10.1145/505202.505228]
• 4: V. Hardman, M. A. Sasse, M. Handley, and A. Watson. Reliable Audio for Use over the Internet. Proc. Internet Society's International Networking Conference (INET), June 1995.
• 5: J.-C. Bolot and A. V. Garcia. The Case for FEC-based Error Control for Packet Audio in the Internet. ACM Multimedia Systems, 1997.
• 6: M. Zorzi. Performance of FEC and ARQ Error Control in Bursty Channels under Delay Constraints. Proc. IEEE Veh. Technol. Conference, 1998.
• 7: R. H. Deng and M. L. Lin. A Type I Hybrid ARQ System with Adaptive Code Rates. IEEE Transactions on Communications, vol. 43, no. 2/3/4, 1995.
• 8: M. Podolsky, S. McCanne, and M. Vetterli. Soft ARQ for Layered Streaming Media. Journal of VLSI Signal Processing Systems for Signal, Image and Video Technology, Special Issue on Multimedia Signal Processing, Kluwer Academic Publishers, April 2000.
• 9: D. Loguinov and H. Radha. On Retransmissions Schemes for Real-time Streaming in the Internet. Proc. of IEEE INFOCOM, May 2001.
• 10: V. Jacobson, Congestion avoidance and control, ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, v.18 n.4, p.314-329, August 1988
• 11: J. Lin and S. Paul. RMTP: A Reliable Multicast Transport Protocol. Proc. IEEE INFOCOM, March 1996.
• 12: Christos Papadopoulos , Guru Parulkar , George Varghese, Light-weight multicast services (LMS): a router-assisted scheme for reliable multicast, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON), v.12 n.3, p.456-468, June 2004 [doi>10.1109/TNET.2004.828938]
• 13: C. Perkins, O. Hodson and V. Hardman. A Survey of Packet Loss Recovery Techniques for Streaming Media. IEEE Network Magazine, September/October 1998.
• 14: Internet Engineering Task Force. Requirements for Internet Hosts -- Communication Layers. RFC 1122, October 1989.
• 15: Iperf. http://dast.nlanr.net/Projects/Iperf/
• 16: NistNet. http://snad.ncsl.nist.gov/nistnet/

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.2 Network Protocols
          Subjects: Applications (SMTP, FTP, etc.)

General Terms:
Design

Keywords:
continuous media, retransmission, streaming