BooSTER: Broadcast stream transmission epidemic repair

Wireless broadcasting systems, such as Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB), are subject to signal degradation, having an effect on end users' reception quality. Reception quality can be improved by increasing signal strength, but this comes at a significantly increased energy use and still without guaranteeing error-free reception. In this paper we present BOOSTER, a fully decentralized epidemic-based system that boosts reception quality by cooperatively repairing lossy packet streams among the community of DVB viewers. To validate our system, we collected real data by deploying a set of DVB receivers geographically distributed in and around Amsterdam and Utrecht, The Netherlands. We implemented and tested our system in PeerSim, using our collected real trace information as input. We present in detail the crucial design decisions, the algorithms that underpin our system, the realistic experimental methodology, as well as extensive results that demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of this approach. In particular we conclude that the upload bandwidth required by each node for significant recovery of a real DVB broadcast is in the order of 5KB/sec when nodes allow up to 2 second delay for repairing - a rather trivial bandwidth for today's typical ADSL connections with an acceptable introduced delay.