A hybrid FEC-ARQ protocol for low-delay lossless sequential data streaming

Interactive Internet Applications that rely on sequential
streams for lossless data exchange often use retransmission
protocols (e.g. TCP) for reliability and the guarantee of sequential
data ordering. More so than for bulk file transfer or
media delivery, lossless sequential streaming poses an even
greater challenge for the common problem cases of retransmission
protocols, such as lossy links or long network paths,
manifesting as significant latency in the interactive user experience.
We propose a hybrid FEC-ARQ protocol built on a
packet streaming code that reduces to a simple strategy over
sending or resending original data packets or check packets
combining undecoded packets, based on actual network conditions.
Experimental results show that our proposed protocol
can significantly improve the total delay over retransmission
and other schemes that use FEC, under a range of bandwidth
and loss scenarios.