A Rate-Distortion Based Comparison of Media-Dependent FEC and MDC for Real-Time Audio

Applications that require low loss probabilities in today's Internet have to employ some end-to-end error-recovery mechanism. For interactive applications with strict delay constraints, the delay introduced by the applied schemes has to be low as well. In this paper, the authors compare two schemes proposed for error recovery for real-time audio applications: Media-Dependent Forward Error Correction (MD-FEC) and Multiple Description Coding (MDC). They conclude that MDC always performs better than MDFEC, and that the average loss probability plays a key role in the choice of the optimal parameters for these schemes.