Progressively reliable transport protocol for interactive wireless multimedia

We propose a progressively reliable transport protocol for delivery of delay-sensitive multimedia over Internet connections with wireless access links. The protocol, termed `Leaky' ARQ, initially permits corrupt packets to be leaked to the receiving application and then uses retransmissions to progressively refine the quality of subsequent packet versions. A Web server would employ Leaky ARQ to quickly deliver a possibly corrupt first version of an image over a noisy bandlimited wireless link for immediate display by a Web browser. Later, Leaky ARQ's retransmissions would enable the browser to eventually display a cleaner image. Forwarding and displaying corrupt error-tolerant image data: (1) lowers the perceptual delay compared to fully reliable packet delivery, and (2) can be shown to produce images with lower distortion than aggressively compressed images when the delay budget only permits weak forward error correction. Leaky ARQ supports delaying of re-transmissions, so that initial packet transmissions can be expedited, and cancelling of retransmissions associated with `out-of-date' data. Leaky ARQ can be parametrized to partially retransmit audio and video. We propose to implement Leaky ARQ by modifying Type-II Hybrid/`code combining' ARQ.