PACKET LOSS

Another Internet characteristic that is important to voice and video applications is packet loss. Two factors are involved: (a) how often packet loss occurs and (b) how many successive (contiguous) packets are affected. Packet loss is masked in a data application by using TCP to resend the lost TCP segments. Certainly, the loss of many segments and their retransmissions will affect the application's performance, but on the whole, the end-user data application is not concerned (or aware) of packet loss.

Packet loss is quite important in voice and video applications, since the loss may affect the outcome of the decoding process at the receiver, and may also be detected by the end-user's ears or eyes. Notwithstanding, today's voice coders ...

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