UDP-Liter: an improved UDP protocol for real-time multimedia applications over wireless links

For wireless real-time multimedia applications, the excessive packet loss rate suffered at the receiver, especially when the packets are transported on UDP, is a major issue to resolve. The previously proposed UDP-Lite project was designed to replace traditional UDP, so that erroneous UDP payloads could be passed up to the application layer instead of being discarded. The main argument of UDP-Lite is that many real-time multimedia applications actually prefer damaged packets over lost ones because of their error resilience capabilities. The major drawback of UDP-Lite is the backward incompatibility against traditional UDP stacks in numerous UDP devices. In addition, applications have no choice but to accept UDP-Lite packets as normal ones. This paper introduces another approach, UDP-Liter, which makes use of the concept of UDP-Lite, and yet maintains 100% backward compatibility. Better yet, UDP-Liter will give applications the flexibility to handle normal packets and corrupted packets differently.