Demonstration of adjusting forward error correction with quality scaling for TCP-friendly streaming MPEG

The growth in the power and connectivity of the Internet has sparked an even larger growth in streaming media. The sheer number of possible users and applications at any point in time raises the probability of streaming multimedia flows encountering congestion. To overcome short-term congestion and avoid long-term congestion collapse, there is a growing consensus that Internet applications must be TCP-Friendly, with proposed approaches to detect and punish non-TCP friendly flows. Unlike TCP, new TCP-friendly streaming media protocols refrain from retransmissions to avoid delay and jitter, but they are susceptible to quality degradation from packet loss. While multimedia applications can tolerate some data loss, excessive packet loss during congestion yields unacceptable media quality. Since video encoding involves interframe dependencies to achieve high compression rates, the random dropping of packets by routers can seriously degrade video quality. For example, as little as 3% MPEG packet loss can cause 30% of the frames to be undecodable. Streaming media flows often utilize lower latency repair approaches, such as Forward Error Correction (FEC), in conjunction with TCP-Friendly protocols to deliver streaming applications over the Internet. However, FEC requires redundant repair data to be added to the original video stream. Current approaches use either apriori, static FEC choices or adapt FEC to perceived packet loss on the network without regard to TCP-Friendly data rate constraints. When a streaming video operates within TCP-Friendly bitrate limits, adding FEC will reduce the effective transmission rate of the original video content.