Coding to Mitigate Video Disruption during Wireless Access Switching

We propose a coding-based solution to mitigate the disruption during switching from unicast to broadcast wireless channels while streaming live video to mobile devices. Our solution, based on unequal error protection principles, takes advantage of side information about the switching time available at the encoder. In particular, we present a method to distribute error protection unequally among the input packets based on their temporal position in the video stream and on the switching time distribution. We implement our proposed encoder and decoder in Matlab and compare the proposed scheme to LT codes and to the naive approach of not using coding at all. Our experiments indicate that our approach results in approximately 8% improvement over plain LT coding and about 20% improvement over a no coding approach.