A performance comparison between expanding window fountain and hierarchical network codes in scalable video coding

Recently, network coding and channel coding are widely applied for scalable video coding in order to achieve the reliable transmission of multimedia data. Network coding as hierarchical network coding (HNC) provides unequal erasure protection for scalable layers and addresses the process of decoding layer by layer from higher to less importance. Similar with that scheme, expanding window fountain (EWF) code is designed for flexible and efficient solution of real-time scalable video multicast. In this paper, we investigate the performance of EWF coding and HNC for scalable video coding over lossy packet networks. The experimental results show that EWF coding achieves better performance than HNC in both good and bad channels.