Information dispersal to improve quality of service on the Internet
Andrés Albanese, Stephan Siemsgluess, Bernd E. Wolfinger · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1998
Applications rely on network transmission services like dedicated ISDN or ATM to provide QoS guarantees for audio and video multimedia data in reasonable quality. This paper describes information dispersal as an alternative method to introduce robustness in error-sensitive and time-constrained when they use best-effort networks like the global Internet. We developed an experimental IP telephony application where the source audio stream is split and passed simultaneously to multiple, different Internet Service Providers. Before sending, the stream is protected with redundant data against eventual losses by an erasure-resilient FEC scheme utilizing a maximum distance separable code. This method assumes that routing paths are mutually independent. Extensive measurements were taken for voice transmission between two computers located on different continents and connected over the public Internet by using four different ISPs. The results show the increased robustness of the generated stream against uncorrelated burst delays and loses. It takes advantage of sharing the original and redundant data among all available connections.