Robust video multicast with joint network coding and AL-FEC

Robust H.264/SVC video multicast with joint network coding (NC) and application-layer forward error correction (AL-FEC) is presented in this work. Unlike traditional AL-FEC that protects the video source only, the NC scheme provides another level of protection by allowing the mixing of transmitted packets in the intermediate nodes of the network. The joint NC/AL-FEC solution simplifies the construction and maintenance of multicast trees greatly, and enables efficient video delivery to heterogeneous receivers. It is shown by computer simulation that the proposed joint NC/AL-FEC scheme outperforms the traditional store-and-forward (S/F) network with AL-FEC only by a large margin.