A Playout Time Oriented Retransmission Scheme for Multimedia Streaming Systems

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a playout time oriented retransmission scheme for multimedia streaming. In the scheme, when the client detects a packet loss, it transmits a retransmission request packet to the server. In multimedia streaming, a packet which does not arrive at the client until its playout time is not played on the client. The server estimates time to play the packet and time which the packet arrives at the client if it is retransmitted. If estimated time to play the packet is later than the time when the packet arrives at the client, the server does not retransmit the packet. This reduces wasteful traffic overhead generated by packets which is not played on the client if they are retransmitted. In this paper, we also discuss results of our experiments for comparing our scheme to the general NACK based retransmission scheme proposed by IETF. The results show that our scheme drastically reduces traffic overhead generated by retransmission and hardly degrades the number of successful retransmitted packets at all.