Redundant UDP packet transmission as a way to decrease packet loss

[florianschmeding]

This feature adds an option to the user to enable packet redundancy and it uses the native feature of the aoo lib for packet redundancy. UDP packets can get lost or unordered on their way to their destination and redundant packets can decrease overall packet loss and the jitter-buffer size if enough bandwidth is available.

To avoid a mindless activation of this feature the user gets warned twice. Once in the tooltip and furthermore by a specific colored feedback if redundancy levels are set to higher than two.

A configured packet redundancy of 4 with colored feedback

[essej]

Interesting! You've actually seen conditions where using the packet redundancy really helps things?

[Spacechild1]

I'm also interested in scenarios where packet redundancy actually helps to overcome packet loss. AFAICT, most UDP packet loss can be traced back to buffer overflows. Typically, you don't mitigate buffer overflows by sending even more data :-)

[AtmanActive]

This makes sense in situations where a network is lossy but it has a lot more bandwidth than required, like, for example WiFi, 3G, 5G... If a network can't guarantee that each and every packet can be transmitted successfully, then, by doubling the number of packets sent we double our chances that at least one packet will go through, as one packet may be dropped, but the other one (it's duplicate) may go through. In scenarios where we are using, for example, 256kbps stream, if the network is lossy, the fact that the network advertises bandwidth of several megabits per second doesn't help us at all. But, if we can send duplicates x2 or x4 even, then, we can overcome packet loss on the expense of bandwidth used. So, this is a method of overcoming network loss by sending multiple copies of the same packet. Of course, this is all theory, how does it work in real world - I have no idea.

[knixx-fm]

Please consider to update the Opus codec for the Sonobus project, because the new release includes alot of functions that improve network stability and audio quality. We might not need a redundant packet transmission anymore.

Some teasers:

• Significant improvement to packet loss robustness using Deep Redundancy (DRED)
• Improved packet loss concealment through Deep PLC
• Low-bitrate speech quality enhancement down to 6 kb/s wideband
• Improved x86 (AVX2) and Arm (Neon) optimizations
• Support for 4th and 5th order ambisonics

https://opus-codec.org/release/stable/2024/03/04/libopus-1_5_1.html

https://opus-codec.org/demo/opus-1.5/

[cbxk1xg]

Please consider to update the Opus codec for the Sonobus project, because the new release includes alot of functions that improve network stability and audio quality. We might not need a redundant packet transmission anymore.

Some teasers:

* Significant improvement to packet loss robustness using Deep Redundancy (DRED)

* Improved packet loss concealment through Deep PLC

* Low-bitrate speech quality enhancement down to 6 kb/s wideband

* Improved x86 (AVX2) and Arm (Neon) optimizations

* Support for 4th and 5th order ambisonics

https://opus-codec.org/release/stable/2024/03/04/libopus-1_5_1.html

https://opus-codec.org/demo/opus-1.5/

That sounds like a really good idea!