M2FEC: An effective FEC based multi-path transmission scheme for interactive multimedia communication

The oncoming prosperity of interactive multimedia application triggers significant challenges to current best-effort Internet due to such application’s stringent delay, loss and bandwidth requirements, and Internet’s unpredictable dynamics. Multi-path transmission and error-resilient coding are two promising approaches to alleviate these problems. This paper attempts to introduce error-resilient coding into multi-path transmission to better trade off between multi-path bandwidth resource consumption and reliable media quality. We propose a model for multi-paths interactive multimedia transmission and develop M2FEC—a FEC based transmission scheme which maximizes the overall quality at the client under various constraints based on the proposed model. Numerical simulation and PlanetLab experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and practicability of M2FEC in theory and in empiricism, respectively.