Asynchronous Media Streaming Over Wireless Broadcast Channels

We consider wireless broadcasting of multimedia content to allow asynchronous media access. Receivers subscribe at any time to the ongoing broadcast session, but are still able to display the media stream from the beginning. A fully scalable broadcasting scheme is presented where the media stream is appropriately segmented and segments are protected by fountain codes. The decoding behavior of rateless codes on wireless as well as on erasure channels is considered within the framework of information collection. Asynchronous data access and full reliability at the same time are achieved. Depending on its receiving conditions the receiver adapts its initial playout delay for high probability of successful playout. Analytical expressions for the failure probability of successful media playout are derived depending on the initial delay and the channel conditions at the receiver