Method for packet-level fec encoding, in which on a source packet-by-source packet basis, the error correction contributions of a source packet to a plurality of wildcard packets are computed, and the source packet is transmitted thereafter

A method for encoding a stream of source packets, in which a plurality of k source packets are packet-level forward error correction encoded to form a plurality of n-k error-correcting wildcard packets, the k source packets and n-k wildcard packets to be transmitted to a receiver, comprising the steps of:

• after the arrival of each source packet, for each byte of said source packet, computing the respective error correction contributions to the corresponding bytes of said plurality of wildcard packets;
• transmitting said source packet to the receiver without waiting for the arrival of another source packet of said plurality of source packets;
• for each wildcard packet byte, summing said error correction contribution of the source packet in an accumulator, but if no source packet has arrived within a predetermined period of time after a previously-arriving packet k′, the remaining k-k′ source packets are assumed to be zero, resulting in an error correction contribution of zero for those k-k′ packets;
• after the error correction contributions have been computed using the k′ source packets and summed for all n-k wildcard packets, transmitting the wildcard packets to the receiver.