Lightweight piggybacking for packet loss recovery in internet telephony

We consider an Internet telephony system in which the service provider operates a telephone gateway in each servicing city to serve the general public. We propose a packet loss recovery system, called lightweight piggybacking, for this system. This scheme applies two stages of erasure coding and fragmentation, such that only a small redundancy is piggybacked to each voice packet while this redundancy can be shared by multiple voice streams to a large extent for effective packet loss recovery. Compared with the conventional piggybacking scheme, the lightweight piggybacking scheme can effectively: (i) increase the probability of recovering the lost packets using the same or smaller amount of redundancy, and (ii) recover the loss of multiple and consecutive packets.