Shared packet loss recovery for Internet telephony

We consider an Internet telephony system in which the service provider operates a telephone gateway in each servicing city to serve the general public. We propose a shared packet loss recovery scheme for this system. Using this scheme, each gateway uses erasure code to add redundant packets such that its outgoing voice streams share these redundant packets for packet loss recovery. This scheme has two advantages: (1) it has a small probability of packet loss because multiple voice streams can share the redundant packets for effective packet loss recovery, and (2) it involves a small recovery delay because it uses the packets from multiple voice streams for packet loss recovery.