Distributed Scheduling for Low-Delay and Loss-Resilient Media Streaming With Network Coding

Network coding (NC) has been shown to be very effective for collaborative media streaming applications. A pivotal issue in media streaming with NC lies in the packet scheduling policy at the network nodes, which affects the perceived media quality. In this paper, we address the problem of finding the packet scheduling policy that maximizes the number of media segments recovered in the network. We cast this as a distributed minimization problem and propose heuristic solutions that make the proposed framework robust to infrequent or inaccurate feedback information. Moreover, the proposed framework accounts for the properties of layered and multiple description encoded media to provide graceful quality degradation in case of packet losses or lack of upload bandwidth. Experimental results on a local testbed as well as PlanetLab suggest that our scheduling framework achieves better media quality, lower playback delay, and lower bandwidth consumption than a random-push scheme.