Streaming erasure codes under mismatched source-channel frame rates

Abstract

Streaming erasure codes sequentially encode a source stream into channel packets over a burst erasure channel and guarantee that each source frame is recovered within a fixed decoding delay. We study streaming codes when M channel packets need to be transmitted between successive source frames. This extends earlier works which exclusively focus on the case when M = 1. We obtain a general upper bound on the associated streaming capacity and show that it can be achieved for sufficiently large decoding delays using a layered code. For the minimum possible decoding delay we also establish the streaming capacity and show that it can be obtained using a repetition code.