Structured Network Coding and Cooperative Wireless Ad-Hoc Peer-to-Peer Repair for WWAN Video Broadcast

In a scenario where each peer of an ad-hoc wireless local area network (WLAN) receives one of many available video streams from a wireless wide area network (WWAN), we propose a network-coding-based cooperative repair framework for the ad-hoc peer group to improve broadcast video quality during channel losses. Specifically, we first impose network coding structures globally, and then select the appropriate video streams and network coding types within the structures locally, so that repair can be optimized for broadcast video in a rate-distortion manner. Innovative probability—the likelihood that a repair packet is useful in data recovery to a receiving peer—is analyzed in this setting for accurate optimization of the network codes. Our simulation results show that by using our framework, video quality can be improved by up to 19.71 dB over un-repaired video stream and by up to 5.39 dB over video stream using traditional unstructured network coding.