Design and evaluation of intermediate retransmission and packet loss schemes for MPEG4 transmission

Transmission of video data through the Internet is a time critical application. The RTP protocol is commonly used for sending and receiving multimedia (Kikuchi et al., 2000). Associated with RTP we have the RTCP protocol (Friedman et al., 2003) and the RTP retransmission protocol (Rey et al., 2003) for ensuring a certain quality of service. RTP retransmission is an end to end protocol and hence the latency associated with retransmission is high. We propose an In-network solution which uses network processors routers which can request for retransmission and also service retransmission requests. The amount of parallelism provided by network processors would serve to reduce the packet processing time. We have derived the expected number of paths traversed by a packet before it reaches the client in our method and we also discussed the design of the router on the Intel IXP network processor.