Network Coding-Based Rate Allocation and Bursty Loss Protection for Video Streaming over Wireless Multi-hop Networks

The limited bandwidth resources and high packet loss probability are the main challenges when supporting video streaming over wireless multi-hop networks. Therefore, to maximize the video quality at the client, it is indispensable to concurrently take the following two aspects into account: allocating multi-stream´s rate efficiently and coping properly with the high packet loss rate. Application of network coding for multimedia streaming is getting more and more attention recently. With the capability of improving the network throughput and resilience to transmission errors, combination of inter-session and intra-session network coding can better solve these challenging problems. In this paper, we investigate the problem of allocating the rate for multiple simultaneous video sessions with inter-session network coding, and identify the redundancy which should be added in intra-session network coding, so as to improve the performance of video streaming in the multi-hop wireless networks. We formulate the problem as maximizing network utilization. With extensive experiments, we can see that the proposed scheme optimizes the rate allocation and can better resilient to bursty packet losses. The video quality improvements are also notable.