A forward error correction system for packet based real-time media

A computationally simple yet powerful forward error correction code scheme for transmission of real-time media signals, such as digitized voice, video or audio, in a packet switched network, such as the Internet. According to one aspect, an encoder at the sending end derives p redundancy blocks from each group of a k payload blocks and concatenates the redundancy blocks, respectively, with payload blocks in the next group of k payload blocks. At the receiving end, a decoder may recover up to p missing packets in a group of k packets, provided with the p redundancy blocks carried by the next group of k packets. The invention may, for instance, append to each of a series of payload packets a single forward error correction code that is defined by taking the XOR sum of a preceding specified number of payload packets. The invention thereby enables correction from the loss of multiple packets in a row, without significantly increasing the data rate or otherwise delaying transmission.