A robust and delay-optimized network coding strategy for unicast streaming over multihop packet-lossy networks

A robust and delay-optimized network coding strategy, which is suitable for unicast streaming over multihop packet-lossy networks, is proposed in this paper. The proposed network coding strategy jointly uses systematic network coding technique with delay-constrained limited hop-by-hop feedback to achieve a better tradeoff between end-to-end delay and robustness. Simulation results demonstrated that the proposed network coding strategy has a clear performance advantage over its conventional counterparts. Besides achieving localized adaptive robustness with low end-to-end delay, it can also get steady and higher throughput and utilize bandwidth resource more efficiently.