Packet Permutation: A Robust Transmission Technique for Continuous Media Streaming over the Internet

With the growing popularity of the Internet, there is an increasing demand to deliver continuous media (CM) streams over the Internet. However, packets may be damaged or lost during transmission over the current Internet. In particular, periodic network overloads often result in bursty packet losses, degrading the perceptual quality of CM streaming. In this paper, we focus on reducing the impact of this bursty loss behavior. We propose a novel robust end-to-end transmission scheme, referred to as packet permutation (PP), to deliver pre-compressed continuous media streams over the Internet. At the server side, PP permutes, prior to transmission, the normal packet delivery sequence of CM streams in a specific way. The packets are then re-permuted at the receiver side before they are presented to the application. In this way, the probability of losing a large number of packets within each CM frame can be significantly reduced. To validate the effectiveness of PP, a series of trace-driven simulations are conducted. Our results show that for a given quality of service (QoS) requirement of CM streaming, PP greatly reduces the overhead required by traditional error control schemes, such as forward error correction (FEC) and feedback/retransmission-based schemes.