RTMC: an error control protocol for IP-based audio-visual multicast applications

Transport of audio visual data is becoming an important application of the IP-based best-effort service on the Internet. We present an error control protocol for provision of a real-time reliable multicast transport service. The protocol RTMC (real-time multicast) uses forward error correction (FEC) for protecting first transmissions (i.e. proactive error control) and retransmissions. Results of the performance evaluation show that RTMC error control imposes low latency, and is scalable to a large number of receivers.