Internet Media Streaming Using Network Coding and Path Diversity

Delivering live media content over best-effort Internet is a challenging task due to a number of factors such as packet loss, delay, and bandwidth fluctuation. As a result, many approaches have been proposed ranging from auto repeat request-typed solutions, forward error correcting code to routing and scheduling protocols and network architecture design. Multiple path streaming is an important solution which exploits the path diversity to satisfy the high transmission bandwidth requirement of streaming applications. Recently, network coding has been proposed for efficient information dissemination over packet-switched networks. In this paper, we propose a network coding framework for multiple path streaming over the Internet. In particular, we use a number of random network coding schemes in order to both exploit the benefits of path diversity and prevent packet loss. Our framework works at the application layer using the UDP service and is independent of the current network infrastructure.