Online Versus Offline Rate in Streaming Codes for Variable-Size Messages

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.