Patent ID: 8379530

Claim:
A method for processing data comprising lost or defective segments at a communications receiver, the method comprising: receiving a plurality of segments of data at a segment receiver of a first entity; making a determination that a segment is lost or defective at the segment receiver; aggregating the plurality of segments to form at least one aggregated packet at the first entity; inserting a predetermined pattern at a position in the at least one aggregated packet where the lost or defective segment would be, the predetermined pattern indicating the lost or defective segment, using the segment receiver of the first entity, wherein inserting the predetermined pattern includes inserting a length of the lost or defective segment and a code indicative of a reliability of the inserted length as the predetermined pattern; transmitting the at least one aggregated packet to a packet receiver of a second entity; searching for the inserted predetermined pattern in the at least one aggregated packet; interpreting each found pattern to recover non-lost or non-defective information within the at least one aggregated packet; recovering, from the non-lost or non-defective information within the at least one aggregated packet, individual symbols using a symbol parser; and passing the individual symbols to an application decoder.