Integrating HEC with circuit breakers and multipath RTP to improve RTC media quality

Abstract

The use of hybrid error correction (HEC) schemes that integrate both, forward error correction as well as negative acknowledgments, has proven to be beneficial in substantially improving reliability while keeping transmission rates under control. In this paper we introduce a framework that combines HEC with circuit breakers and multipath media as a way to increase quality without affecting bandwidth performance. Circuit breakers consist of selectively transmitting media frames based on network measurements in order to minimize congestion. On the other hand, multipath media takes advantage of the fact that most modern mobile devices incorporate multiple network interfaces that can be used to transmit traffic simultaneously through many possible routes. We specifically focus on the aforementioned integration scheme when applied in the context of real time communications and quantify it as a function of network impairments by means of standard quality scores for a wide range of speech and video codecs.