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.