RT oblivious erasure correcting

An erasure correcting scheme is rateless if it is designed to tolerate any pattern of packet loss and reveal the information sent after a certain number of packets are received. On one hand, transmission schemes that use rateless erasure correcting usually do not use the feedback channel, however they may require an additional significant amount of processing in both the sender and the receiver sides. On the other hand, automatic repeated request (ARQ) protocols use the feedback channel to assist the sender and usually do not require information processing. In this work we present a combined approach where a lean feedback channel is used to assist the sender to efficiently transmit the information. Our real-time oblivious approach minimizes the processing and memory required at the receiver, and therefore may fit a variety of receiving devices. In addition, the transmission is real-time where the expected number of original packets revealed when a packet is received is approximately the same through the entire transmission process. We may use our end-to-end scheme as a base for broadcast (and multicast) schemes. An overlay tree structure is used to convey the information to a large number of receivers. Moreover, the receivers may download the information from a number of senders or even migrate from one sender to another.