Multimedia wireless transmission with network coding

In recent years, Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) have become the premier choice for many homes and enterprises. WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) has also emerged as the wireless standard that aims to deliver data over long distances, and can potentially provide wireless broadband access as an alternative to the wired cable and DSL networks. Parallel with the surge of wireless networks is the explosive growth of multimedia applications. Therefore, it is important to explore efficient methods for delivering multimedia data in such wireless settings. In this paper, we propose a network coding based scheduling policy to be used at WLAN-like Access Point (AP) or at a WiMAX-like broadcast station that optimizes the multimedia transmission in both broadcast and unicast settings. In particular, the contributions of this paper include (a) a framework for increasing the bandwidth efficiency of broadcast and unicast sessions in a wireless network based on network coding techniques and (b) an optimized scheduling algorithm based on the Markov Decision Process (MDP) to maximize the quality of multimedia applications. Simulations and theoretical results demonstrate the advantages of our approach over the conventional techniques.