A survey of packet loss recovery techniques for streaming audio

We survey a number of packet loss recovery techniques for streaming audio applications operating using IP multicast. We begin with a discussion of the loss and delay characteristics of an IP multicast channel, and from this show the need for packet loss recovery. Recovery techniques may be divided into two classes: sender- and receiver-based. We compare and contrast several sender-based recovery schemes: forward error correction (both media-specific and media-independent), interleaving, and retransmission. In addition, a number of error concealment schemes are discussed. We conclude with a series of recommendations for repair schemes to be used based on application requirements and network conditions     

Efficient wireless multicast retransmission using network coding

In wireless multicast,network coding has recently attracted attentions as a substantial improvement to packet retransmission schemes.However,the problem of finding the optimal network code which minimizes the retransmissions is hard to solve or approximate.This paper presents two schemes to reduce the number of retransmissions for reliable multicast efficiently.One is retransmission using network coding based on improved Vandermonde matrix(VRNC),the other is retransmission using network coding based on adaptive improved Vandermonde matrix(AVRNC).Using VRNC scheme the sender selects the packets all receivers have lost and encodes them with improved Vandermonde matrix;when receivers receive enough encoded retransmission packets,all the lost packets can be recovered.With AVRNC scheme,the sender can obtain the recovery information from all the receivers after sending out per retransmission packet,and then the improved Vandermonde matrix can be updated,thus reducing the complexity of encoding and decoding.Our proposed schemes can achieve the theoretical lower bound assuming retransmission packets lossless,and approach the theoretical lower bound considering retransmission packets loss.Simulation results show that the proposed algorithms can efficiently reduce the number of retransmissions,thus improving transmission efficiency.     

The Impact of Loss Recovery on Congestion Control for Reliable Multicast

Most existing reliable multicast congestion control (RMCC) mechanisms try to emulate TCP congestion control behaviors for achieving TCP-compatibility. However, different loss recovery mechanisms employed in reliable multicast protocols, especially NAK-based retransmission and local loss recovery mechanisms, may lead to different behaviors and performance of congestion control. As a result, reliable multicast flows might be identified and treated as non-TCP-friendly by routers in the network. It is essential to understand those influences and take them into account in the development and deployment of reliable multicast services. In this paper, we study the influences comprehensively through analysis, modelling and simulations. We demonstrate that NAK-based retransmission and/or local loss recovery mechanisms are much more robust and efficient in recovering from single or multiple packet losses within a single round-trip time (RTT). For a better understanding on the impact of loss recovery on RMCC, we derive expressions for steady-state throughput of NAK-based RMCC schemes, which clearly brings out the throughput advantages of NAK-based RMCC over TCP Reno. We also show that timeout effects have little impact on shaping the performance of NAK-based RMCC schemes except for extremely high loss rates (>0.2). Finally, we use simulations to validate our findings and show that local loss recovery may further increase the throughput and deteriorate the fairness properties of NAK-based RMCC schemes. These findings and insights could provide useful recommendations for the design, testing and deployment of reliable multicast protocols and services     

A media access and feedback protocol for reliable multicast over wireless channel

A link level reliable multicast requires a channel access protocol to resolve the collision of feedback messages sent by multicast data receivers. Several deterministic media access control protocols have been proposed to attain high reliability, but with large delay. Besides, there are also protocols which can only give probabilistic guarantee about reliability, but have the least delay. In this paper, we propose a virtual token-based channel access and feedback protocol (VTCAF) for link level reliable multicasting. The VTCAF protocol introduces a virtual (implicit) token passing mechanism based on carrier sensing to avoid the collision between feedback messages. The delay performance is improved in VTCAF protocol by reducing the number of feedback messages. Besides, the VTCAF protocol is parametric in nature and can easily trade off reliability with the delay as per the requirement of the underlying application. Such a cross layer design approach would be useful for a variety of multicast applications which require reliable communication with different levels of reliability and delay performance. We have analyzed our protocol to evaluate various performance parameters at different packet loss rate and compared its performance with those of others. Our protocol has also been simulated using Castalia network simulator to evaluate the same performance parameters. Simulation and analytical results together show that the VTCAF protocol is able to considerably reduce average access delay while ensuring very high reliability at the same time.     

Exploring the design space of reliable multicast protocols for wireless mesh networks

Many important applications in wireless mesh networks require reliable multicast communication, i.e., with 100% packet delivery ratio (PDR). Previously, numerous multicast protocols based on automatic repeat request (ARQ) have been proposed to improve the packet delivery ratio. However, these ARQ-based protocols can lead to excessive control overhead and drastically reduced throughput. In this paper, we present a comprehensive exploration of the design space for developing high-throughput, reliable multicast protocols that achieve 100% PDR.Motivated by the fact that 802.11 MAC layer broadcast, which is used by most wireless multicast protocols, offers no reliability, we first examine if better hop-by-hop reliability provided by unicasting the packets at the MAC layer can help to achieve end-to-end multicast reliability. We then turn to end-to-end solutions at the transport layer. Previously, forward error correction (FEC) techniques have been proved effective for providing reliable multicast in the Internet, by avoiding the control packet implosion and scalability problems of ARQ-based protocols. In this paper, we examine if FEC techniques can be equally effective to support reliable multicast in wireless mesh networks. We integrate four representative reliable schemes (one ARQ, one FEC, and two hybrid) originally developed for the Internet with a representative multicast protocol ODMRP and evaluate their performance.Our experimental results via extensive simulations offer an in-depth understanding of the various choices in the design space. First, compared to broadcast-based unreliable ODMRP, using unicast for per-hop transmission only offers a very small improvement in reliability under low load, but fails to improve the reliability under high load due to the significantly increased capacity requirement which leads to congestion and packet drop. Second, at the transport layer, the use of pure FEC can significantly improve the reliability, increasing PDR up to 100% in many cases, but can be inefficient in terms of the number of redundant packets transmitted. In contrast, a carefully designed ARQ–FEC hybrid protocol, such as RMDP, can also offer 100% reliability while improving the efficiency by up to 38% compared to a pure FEC scheme. To our best knowledge, this is the first in-depth study of high-throughput, reliable multicast protocols that provide 100% PDR for wireless mesh networks.     

Efficient Retransmission Methods in Wireless MAC Protocol for Multicast

Recent studies on reliable wireless multicast have focused on sending acknowledgement packets from all member stations to the source. Although these studies provide methods of improving the reliability, there have not been any studies on retransmission methods for wireless multicast. Multicast packets are retransmitted based on the unicast transmission rule, which retransmits until all members successfully receive the packet. In this paper, an efficient retransmission method is proposed. The retransmission lasts until the target packet delivery ratio of each member is met. Moreover, the contention window size for retransmission is adjusted based on the reception status of the previous transmission. The performance of the proposed wireless multicast is evaluated by extensive simulations.     

中继协作无线网络中不完美反馈下基于网络编码的重传方案

无线广播网络传输过程中,目的节点反馈信息丢失或部分丢失导致发送节点不能了解目的节点的真实接收状态.为提高不完美反馈下无线网络的重传效率,本文提出中继协作无线网络中不完美反馈下基于网络编码的重传方案.本方案基于部分可观察马尔科夫决策过程对不完美反馈下的重传过程进行建模.发送节点根据系统观测状态和最大置信度更新系统估计状态,根据数据包发送顺序,优先选择最早丢失且能够恢复最多丢包的编码包重传.目的节点缓存不可解编码包以提升编解码机会.重传过程中源节点关注目的节点请求包需求,相同情况优先选择传输可靠性较高的中继节点,以提升传输有效性.仿真结果表明,在不完美反馈下相对于传统方案,本方案可有效提高重传效率.     

Weight Pick: an efficient packet selection algorithm for network coding based multicast retransmission in mobile communication networks

This paper proposes an efficient packet selection algorithm, called Weight Pick, for improving the efficiency of a network coding based multicast retransmission protocol in mobile communication networks. Unlike existing packet selection algorithms, Weight Pick introduces the concept of a dynamic combination number in performing network coding. Based on this concept, a base station dynamically determines the number of packets combined or encoded in a retransmission packet based on the current packet receiving status of users and the combination number for each retransmission packet can be different. In packet selection, Weight Pick attempts to find an encoding combination whose weight is not less than (C ? 1) for every user, where C is the combination number of that retransmission packet. Simulation results show that Weight Pick can significantly improve the retransmission performance as compared with existing packet selection algorithms in terms of both packet loss ratio and packet transmission delay.     

Ad hoc网络基于协同的可靠组播丢失恢复算法设计

在Ad hoc网络中保证组播通信的可靠性要面对Ad hoc网络高误码率、带宽受限、节点能量有限和拓扑结构频繁变化等技术挑战。该文将协同的思想引入到组播丢失恢复设计中,设计了新的基于协同的可靠组播丢失恢复算法(CoreRM)。根据各个节点经历的不同丢失情况,通过自适应选择本地恢复、全局恢复或发送端恢复,分布式地处理整个网络的丢失恢复。CoreRM还设计了恢复路径缓存、NAK抑制机制,以及源路由数据包(SPM)发送机制来应对Ad hoc网络中的拓扑变化。性能分析和NS2的仿真实验表明相对于UDP和PGM可靠组播通信,CoreRM算法可以在网络吞吐量和丢失恢复延时方面有显著性能改善。     

A reliable overlay video transport protocol for multicast agents in wireless mesh networks

A new video transport protocol for multicast agents in wireless mesh networks (WMNs) is proposed in this paper. The proposed protocol enables a significant reduction in the transmission overhead, while providing reliable communication for its use in multicast applications. This proposed reliable protocol provides a practical approach for an overlay peer‐to‐peer multicast facility supported within the application layer. This obviates the need to give upgraded routers capable of handling multicast broadcasting or modify the existing protocol stack. The protocol tolerates partial losses in multimedia transmissions, while supporting control of the delay sensitivity of such transmissions in WMNs. The key issue in this protocol is the ability to detect packet loss, anticipate retransmission requests, and use the anticipated retransmission requests to transmit the lost packets prior to requests from other receiving agents. The proposed protocol allows for the receiver to determine if retransmission of lost packets is required, ensuring the greatest flexibility needed for a reliable multicast protocol. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Erasure coding for reliable adaptive retransmission in wireless broadcast/multicast systems

In this paper, we present new adaptive automatic repeat request (ARQ) schemes for wireless broadcast/multicast combining erasure coding (EC) and packet retransmission. Traditional approaches rely on retransmitting the lost packets in a point-to-point or point-to-multipoint mode. The main idea behind the presented protocols is to retransmit adaptive combinations of the lost packets using EC, which can help several receivers to recover the lost information with fewer retransmission attempts. We propose two versions of EC-based ARQ protocols, and investigate theoretically the corresponding transmission bandwidths in different contexts. We show through simulation results the efficiency of the proposed protocols with respect to conventional ARQ strategies and new published ARQ works for broadcast/multicast. Finally, a new sliding window NACK feedback policy is presented for the case of a high number of receivers to avoid the feedback implosion problem.     

Investigation of multicast‐based mobility support in all‐IP cellular networks

To solve the IP mobility problem, the use of multicast has been proposed in a number of different approaches, applying multicast in different characteristic ways. We provide a systematic discussion of fundamental options for multicast‐based mobility support and the definition and experimental performance evaluation of selected schemes. The discussion is based on an analysis of the architectural, performance‐related, and functional requirements. By using these requirements and selecting options regarding network architecture and multicast protocols, we identify promising combinations and derive four case studies for multicast‐based mobility in IP‐based cellular networks. These case studies include both the standard any‐source IP multicast model as well as non‐standard multicast models, which optimally utilize the underlying multicast. We describe network architecture and protocols as well as a flexible software environment that allows to easily implement these and other classes of mobility‐supporting multicast protocols. Multicast schemes enable a high degree of flexibility for mobility mechanisms in order to meet the service quality required by the applications with minimal protocol overhead. We evaluate this overhead using our software environment by implementing prototypes and quantifying handoff‐specific metrics, namely, handoff and paging latency, packet loss and duplication rates, as well as TCP goodput. The measurement results show that these multicast‐based schemes improve handoff performance for high mobility in comparison to the reference cases: basic and hierarchical Mobile IP. Comparing the multicast‐schemes among each other the performance for the evaluated metrics is very similar. As a result of the conceptual framework classification and our performance evaluations, we justify specific protocol mechanisms that utilize specific features of the multicast. Based on this justification, we advocate the usage of a source‐specific multicast service model for multicast‐based mobility support that adverts the weaknesses of the classical Internet any‐source multicast service model. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Optimized Congestion Management Protocol for Healthcare Wireless Sensor Networks

The application of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) in healthcare is dominant and fast growing. In healthcare WSN applications (HWSNs) such as medical emergencies, the network may encounter an unpredictable load which leads to congestion. Congestion problem which is common in any data network including WSN, leads to packet loss, increasing end-to-end delay and excessive energy consumption due to retransmission. In modern wireless biomedical sensor networks, increasing these two parameters for the packets that carry EKG signals may even result in the death of the patient. Furthermore, when congestion occurs, because of the packet loss, packet retransmission increases accordingly. The retransmission directly affects the lifetime of the nodes. In this paper, an Optimized Congestion management protocol is proposed for HWSNs when the patients are stationary. This protocol consists of two stages. In the first stage, a novel Active Queue Management (AQM) scheme is proposed to avoid congestion and provide quality of service (QoS). This scheme uses separate virtual queues on a single physical queue to store the input packets from each child node based on importance and priority of the source’s traffic. If the incoming packet is accepted, in the second stage, three mechanisms are used to control congestion. The proposed protocol detects congestion by a three-state machine and virtual queue status; it adjusts the child’s sending rate by an optimization function. We compare our proposed protocol with CCF, PCCP and backpressure algorithms using the OPNET simulator. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol is more efficient than CCF, PCCP and backpressure algorithms in terms of packet loss, energy efficiency, end-to-end delay and fairness.     

Iterative packet combining schemes for intersymbol interferencechannels

We study packet combining techniques for retransmission schemes over intersymbol interference (ISI) channels. Two types of combining schemes are investigated, namely, maximum-likelihood combining (MLC) and iterative combining (IC). By first employing a precoding technique and then by interpreting the ISI channel as a trellis code, the transmissions of the same data packet at different times through the channel can be treated as the parallel concatenation of recursive trellis codes. If interleavers are used in between retransmissions, "turbo" coding gains can be achieved by iterative equalization. It is shown that IC provides excellent performance and outperforms other forms of combining in terms of frame error rate performance both analytically and through simulations     

最小化重传次数的无线网络编码广播重传算法

提出了一种最小化重传次数的无线网络编码广播重传算法。针对无线广播网络,本文首先引入了缓存网络编码（C-IDNC）的概念,在接收端,正确接收但不能解码的网络编码数据包将被缓存起来等待将来的解码机会而不是简单的丢弃该编码包。其次,通过对基于IDNC重传策略的问题描述,分析了不同因素对重传次数的影响,并把这些影响因子量化为可度量的数值。随后,构造了IDNC图 ,用于表征所有可行编码和编码增益,并把最小化重传次数问题转化为最大权重搜寻问题,给出了寻找最优解的编码方法。同时,为降低算法复杂度和计算量,提出一种启发式的最大权重搜寻算法（CI-MWSA）。仿真结果表明,与传统方案相比,提出的策略和算法能有效提高重传效率、减少重传次数。      

支持WiMAX节点灵活休眠的两阶段可靠多播策略

节能是无线网络的一个重要课题.针对IEEE 802.16e标准第2类节能模型中监听窗口长度固定会导致一些空闲移动站因得不到及时休眠而浪费能量这一不足,该文提出"两阶段可靠多播策略",让基站在第1阶段多播数据包,在第2阶段对第1阶段丢失的数据包进行网络编码并重播.该策略让移动站一旦空闲就进入休眠,实现了时延约束下数据包的可靠传递.仿真试验表明,该策略可以降低能耗,且移动站的占空比、能耗、吞吐率、丢包率等指标均优于传统的重传与确认方案.     

Scalable fair reliable multicast using active services

Scalability is of paramount importance in the design of reliable multicast transport protocols, and requires careful consideration of a number of problems such as feedback implosion, retransmission scoping, distributed loss recovery, and congestion control. In this article, we present a reliable multicast architecture that invokes active services at strategic locations inside the network to comprehensively address these challenges. Active services provide the ability to quickly and efficiently recover from loss at the point of loss. They also exploit the physical hierarchy for feedback aggregation and effective retransmission scoping with minimal router support. We present two protocols, one for packet loss recovery and another for congestion control, and describe an experimental testbed where these have been implemented. Analytical and experimental results are used to demonstrate that the active services architecture improves resource usage, reduces latency for loss recovery, and provides TCP-friendly congestion control     

A taxonomy of multicast data origin authentication: Issues and solutions

Multicasting is an efficient communication mechanism for group-oriented applications such as videoconferencing, broadcasting stock quotes, interactive group games, and video on demand. The lack of security obstructs a large deployment of this efficient communication model. This limitation motivated a host of research works that have addressed the many issues relating to securing the multicast, such as confidentiality, authentication, non-repudiation, integrity, and access control. Many applications, such as broadcasting stock quotes and video-conferencing, require data origin authentication of the received traffic. Hence, data origin authentication is an important component in the multicast security architecture. Multicast data origin authentication must take into consideration the scalability and the efficiency of the underlying cryptographic schemes and mechanisms, because multicast groups can be very large and the exchanged data is likely to be heavy in volume (streaming). Besides, multicast data origin authentication must be robust enough against packet loss because most multicast multimedia applications do not use reliable packet delivery. Therefore, multicast data origin authentication is subject to many concurrent and competitive challenges, when considering these miscellaneous application-level requirements and features. In this article we review and classify recent works dealing with the data origin authentication problem in group communication, and we discuss and compare them with respect to some relevant performance criteria.     

QoS multicast routing with delay constraints

Proliferation of group-based real-time applications, such as online games and video conferencing has motivated research into QoS multicast routing. These types of applications require consideration of both source-to-destination delay (i.e., packet delay from the source to all destinations) and inter-destination delay variation (i.e., the difference in packet delay from the source to different destinations) constraints. In this paper, we formulate a new combined problem for delay partitioning and multicast routing with source-to-destination delay and inter-destination delay variation constraints in a QoS framework, where a delay dependent cost function is associated with each network link. After identifying the problem asnp-complete, we introduce a Genetic Algorithm (ga) based algorithm that computes a source-based multicast tree which satisfies both constraints with near-optimal cost. We compare differentga schemes using different selection operators and find that the combination of Steady Statega and Remainder Stochastic Sampling selection operator works best for our problem. Simulation results also show that ourga heuristic consistently perfornis better than several other simple heuristics.