Online Versus Offline Rate in Streaming Codes for Variable-Size Messages
Abstract
One pervasive challenge in providing a high quality-of-service for live communication is to recover lost packets in real-time. Streaming codes are a class of erasure codes that are designed for such strict, low-latency streaming communication settings. Motivated by applications that transmit messages whose sizes vary over time, such as live video streaming, this paper considers the setting of streaming codes under variable-size messages. In practice, streaming codes operate in an "online" setting where the sizes of the future messages are unknown. "Offline" codes, in contrast, have access to the sizes of all messages, including future ones. This paper introduces the first online rate-optimal streaming codes for communicating over a burst-only packet loss channel for two broad parameter regimes. These two online codes match the rates of optimal offline codes for the two settings despite the apparent advantage of the offline setting. This paper further establishes that online codes cannot attain the optimal rate for offline codes for all remaining parameter settings.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2006.03045,
title = {Online Versus Offline Rate in Streaming Codes for Variable-Size Messages},
author = {Michael Rudow and K. V. Rashmi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.03045},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
21 pages, 15 figures, this is an extended version of the IEEE ISIT 2020 paper with the same title, which is now published in full in the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory