Predictably reliable media transport over wireless home networks

Despite the fact that the Internet Protocol has not been designed to carry real-time media services at high data rate, such as digital TV in High Definition resolution, it is mean-while widely deployed as an alternative carrier infrastructure. Especially the IEEE 802.11 family of wireless LAN standards offers a convenient and inexpensive way to deliver media streams within the home network area. However, a sufficiently reliable, continuous and scalable transport scheme for real-time audiovisual content at high data rates, especially in wireless multicast, is still missing. By design and implementation of an adaptive packet-level hybrid error correction scheme, we demonstrate how those requirements are achieved with “predictable reliability”. In contrast to partial reliability, predictable reliability explicitly adapts to the application's requirements such as bounded end-to-end delay and residual packet loss rate. It fulfills those constraints by minimizing the coding overhead dynamically under the current network properties. Different experiments in a wireless local network environment demonstrate the performance of our approach under highly variable network conditions.