in one embodiment , a receiver for a frame of media packets employing the real - time transmission protocol and forward error correction is disclosed . the receiver comprises a packet buffer and an fec decoder . after a packet is received by the packet buffer , the fec decoder reads the packet and , as part of fec processing , performs an xor operation on the packet , without waiting for the entire frame to be received . the xor operation results are accumulated until sufficient packets are received to reconstruct a missing packet in the frame . because the xor operations are performed immediately after a packet is received , without any delay from waiting for subsequent packets , the receiver has a very low latency , and the packet buffer may be relatively small .