Throughput-Smoothness Trade-offs in Multicasting of an Ordered Packet Stream

An increasing number of streaming applications need packets to be strictly in-order at the receiver. This paper provides a framework for analyzing in-order packet delivery in such applications. We consider the problem of multicasting an ordered stream of packets to two users over independent erasure channels with instantaneous feedback to the source. Depending upon the channel erasures, a packet which is in-order for one user, may be redundant for the other. Thus there is an inter-dependence between throughput and the smoothness of in-order packet delivery to the two users. We use a Markov chain model of packet decoding to analyze these throughput-smoothness trade-offs of the users, and propose coding schemes that can span different points on each trade-off.