Offline Adaptive Forward Error Correction (AFEC) for Reliable Multicast

The use of FEC/AFEC (adaptive forward error correction) for reliable multicast is not new. However, they are still not widely accepted as the de facto standard for recovering lost data. The primary reason is the added CPU overhead involved in generating the parity data. In this paper, we propose a technique to move the generation of AFEC parity data offline, on the server side. Thus, avoiding any CPU overhead associated with parity data generation. The challenge on the server side would be to meet the expectations of all the clients for a particular multicast. Since different clients may experience different loss rates at the same time, the challenge is to satisfy their needs in an optimal way without causing network congestion