Streaming Codes for Three-Node Relay Networks With Burst Erasures

We study burst erasure correcting streaming codes for three-node relay networks, where there is a source-relay link and a relay-destination link. These codes guarantee that all message packets are recovered within a delay of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\tau $ </tex-math></inline-formula> time slots, given that a single burst erasure of length at most b packets occurs in both links. Leveraging previously known techniques in the streaming code literature, we first provide a simple upper bound on the rate of burst erasure correcting streaming codes for three-node relay networks. Our main result is a coding scheme that achieves rates arbitrarily close to the rate upper bound, as message size increases.