FEBER: Feedback Based Erasure Recovery for Real-Time Multicast over 802.11 Networks

We consider the problem of broadcasting data streams over a wireless network for multiple receivers with reliability and timely delivery guarantees. In our framework, we consider packets that need to be delivered within a given time interval, after which the packet is no longer useful at the application layer. We set the notion of critical packet and, based on periodic feedback from the receivers, we propose a retransmission scheme that will guarantee timely delivery of such packets, as well as packets that are innovative for other receivers. Our solution provides a trade-off between packet delivery ratio and bandwidth use, which contrasts with existing approaches such as FEC and ARQ, where the focus is on ensuring reliability first, offering no guarantees of timely delivery of data. We evaluate the performance of our proposal in a 802.11 wireless network testbed.