A novel approach for multicast video streaming in hybrid networks

With the development of broadcast wireless networks high efficiency of wireless video transmission has been received increasingly greater attentions than before. Multimedia streaming services via hybrid networks, constituted by terrestrial wireless networks linked together by satellite, present major challenge in the management of network bandwidth. In this paper we propose a novel approach based on a packet level and a bit level FEC for improving the quality of service of multicast video streaming. We performed an extensive measurement campaign in an indoor scenario evaluating a statistical description of the bit error distribution for the terrestrial wireless link. We show that a bit level FEC can decrease the bandwidth wasting due to the application of an upper layer FEC only. Finally, we evaluate the performance of our approach in terms of recovered packets, bandwidth saving, and video quality.