Abstract

A growing number of network applications require the use of a reliable multicast protocol to send stream media from a source to a potentially large number of receivers. This work introduces a new technique that integrates word Interleaving, Forward Error Correction (FEC) and Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) to increase reliability. Our laboratory work showed the practical feasibility of a software implementation of the hybrid FEC/ARQ and interleaving scheme. We also present a comparative performance analysis of the hybrid FEC/ARQ scheme and the ARQ only scheme and show the influence of varying sending rates, group sizes, and packet loss probabilities. We evaluate the performance of our hybrid FEC/ARQ scheme and adapt redundancy factor to cope with a high loss rate and large-scale receivers. We demonstrate how appropriate amount of redundancy combined with coding decreases the bandwidth overhead, eliminates NAK implosion, reduces the residual error rate, and helps to meet real-time guarantees.