On the Performance of Network Coding in Multi-Resolution Wireless Video Streaming

Scalable video can be used to provide video streaming reliably to an heterogeneous set of receivers with different subscription levels. However, the performance of such schemes can be highly affected by scheduling constraints and unreliable feedback. Network coding, on the other hand, has been shown to reduce scheduling and prioritization problems and to perform well in wireless scenarios with perfect feedback. Motivated by this observation, we implement and analyze a system architecture for network coding-based multiresolution video streaming in a wireless environment. In contrast to existing work, we take into account realistic feedback, where the control packets are sent over the same unreliable channel as data packets, and compare it to the case of perfect feedback, where the server has perfect knowledge of the state of the buffer at every receiver. We provide an evaluation of the system via simulation and show that even in highly volatile environments, a network coding-based scheme with limited and unreliable feedback can achieve a good performance.