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

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Abstract

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.

Introduction

With the rapid development of multimedia and network technologies, various interactive multimedia applications are rising up over current Internet, including voice/video over IP, video conference, massive multi-player online games, distance learning and tel-medicine. These commercioganic applications allow people to interact regardless of geographical distance between them. They are changing the way people communicate and access information. The high interactivity and bandwidth consumption properties of such applications bring forward stringent delay, bandwidth and packet loss requirements. However, current generation Internet was not originally designed for real-time applications but for data transmission and only provides best-effort services, which makes the deployment of high-quality interactive applications unprecedented challenge.

During the past decade, several efforts have been devoted to provide QoS for Internet and improve end user experience. The existing approaches can be classified into three categories. From IP-layer perspective, InterServ, DiffServ, RSVP and MPLS [1], [2], [3], [4] have been proposed. However, the need of changing network infrastructures or service model limits the wide deployment for these solutions. From application-layer perspective, overlay routing techniques have been widely used in practice to overcome Internet’s inherent limitations and enhance end-to-end performance for interactive applications [5], [6], [7], [8]. Besides the advantage of the potential performance gain, robustness improvement and flexibility routing, overlay routing also has the great benefit of simple to implement compared with IP-layer solutions. From coding perspective, error-resilient techniques such as layered coding (LC) [9], multiple description coding (MDC) [10], [11] and forward error correction (FEC) [12] have been proposed to deal with the heterogeneity and time varying nature of the Internet.

No need for special support and easy deployment make application-layer solution and coding layer solution very popular in current Internet. However, most of the previous research focuses on high-quality overlay path selection or efficient coding algorithms design, few paying attention to effectively utilize selected overlay paths with existing error-resilient coding for interactive applications in particular. This paper aims to combine two promising technologies, multiple overlay paths transmission in application-layer solution and FEC coding in coding layer solution, to better trade off between bandwidth efficiency and end-to-end path reliability, thus providing more pleasant experience for end users.

Specifically, the main contributions in this paper include twofold. First, develop an explicit rate–distortion (R–D) based analytical framework M2FEC that models FEC based multi-path transmission for interactive Multimedia. Optimal its coding encoding bitrates, FEC redundancy and multi-path scheduling strategies under a given network environment by addressing the proposed optimization. Secondly, evaluate the efficiency of M2FEC theoretically and empirically by comparing with several other transmission schemes such as Mesh, Round-Robin, Single path FEC and Single path. Implement a practical online computation module of M2FEC transmission scheme on PlanetLab testbed.

The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 outlines current multi-path research and describes the motivation of M2FEC. Section 3 proposes M2FEC transmission model in detail. Numerical analysis results are presented in Section 4. PlanetLab evaluation results are described and illustrated in Section 5. Finally, Section 6 concludes the paper with a discussion of future work.

Section snippets

Analysis of existing multi-path overlay routing

Traditionally, sender transmitted packets to receiver through a single path selected by IP routing protocol. A variety of studies have revealed that many of the current Internet’s routes are far from reliable [13], [14]. If network is congested along the default IP-layer path, multimedia delivering will suffer from high loss rate and jitter which will decrease its consistency and interactivity. The emergence of overlay techniques [15] triggers research on sending packets simultaneously over

Assumption and notations

We begin the description of M2FEC with a set of assumptions:

  • (1)

    The original real-time streams of the same pair of nodes is generated and encoded at uniform speed across time.

  • (2)

    The source-encoded streaming is packetized into the same size packets, and each packet is sent in a time slot of fixed duration.

  • (3)

    By certain multi-path overlay routing algorithm such as [17], [28], sender and receiver have already select several overlay paths with good performance between them, and this paper only investigates

Numerical analysis

Section 3.3 models the transmission schemes of single path, single path with FEC, Mesh, Round-Robin and M2FEC as optimization problems. To evaluate the efficiency of M2FEC, this section will provide quantitative answers to the following three questions:

  • (1)

    Compared with the other four schemes, whether and how much M2FEC could improve media quality under various network environment?

  • (2)

    How much can M2FEC outperform the transmission schemes with other FEC redundancy?

  • (3)

    How well can M2FEC adapt to Internet

Experiment setup

To evaluate the effectiveness of M2FEC in actual Internet communication, we implemented an online transmission module on PlanetLab (see Fig. 6). There are three types of nodes in the module—sender, forwarder and receiver. The senders collect round-trip delay and packets loss rate of each path with the cooperation of forwarders and receivers. Maximum bandwidth along each path is allocated according to the information provided by the project of S3 (Scalable Sensing Service) [26], following the

Conclusion and future work

This paper proposes a framework for analyzing and comparing a variety of multi-path transmission strategies in quantity and develops M2FEC—a FEC based transmission scheme for interactive multimedia applications. M2FEC takes network conditions and application properties into consideration and optimizes media quality at the client by optimizing proposed model online. A series of theoretical analysis and actual Internet experiments validate the superiority and feasibility of M2FEC. Though only

Acknowledgments

This work is sponsored by NEC Laboratories China. The authors thank Dr. Yong Xia of NEC and all the members of Security Lab RITT, Tsinghua University for their valuable discussions and advice.

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