A Dynamic Packet Recovery Mechanism for Realtime Service in Mobile Computing Environments

This paper analyzes the characteristics of packet losses in mobile computing environments based on the Gilbert model and then describes a mechanism that can recover the lost audio packets using redundant data. Using information periodically reported by a receiver, the sender dynamically adjusts the amount and offset values of redundant data with the constraint of minimizing the bandwidth consumption of wireless links. Since mobile computing environments can be often characterized by frequent and consecutive packet losses, loss recovery mechanisms need to deal efficiently with both random and consecutive packet losses. To achieve this, the suggested mechanism uses relatively large, discontinuous exponential offset values. That gives the same effect as using both the sequential and interleaving redundant information. To verify the effectiveness of the mechanism, we extended and implemented RTP/RTCP and applications. The experimental results show that our mechanism, with an exponential offset, achieves a remarkably low complete packet loss rate and adapts dynamically to the fluctuation of the packet loss pattern in mobile computing environments.