Bayesian piggyback control for improving real-time communication quality

The critical tasks in designing a real-time communication system, such as online games, voice chat, and video conference applications, is to keep the end-to-end delay and jitter as low as possible. Delays and jitters are usually caused by network congestion and packet losses. A packet loss event will trigger the timeout retransmission mechanism at the transport layer, however, it is time consuming. Therefore, it is important to detect a loss event and do the retransmission efficiently. To achieve this goal, we propose a Bayesian loss detection mechanism based on the round trip time. We show that our loss detector can achieve high accuracy and high probability of detection as the false alarm ratio is lower than 20%. In addition, we also present a piggyback scheme for packet retransmission. Cooperated with the loss detector, the piggyback scheme can reduce the end-to-end delay and jitter to less than half of that of the original real-time communication system. Moreover, it generates few overheads to the network.