Live scalable video streaming on peer-to-peer overlays with network coding

Scalable video coding is a paradigm that allows partial decoding of the video stream at reduced resolution, frame-rate or quality, adapting to display requirements and reception conditions of heterogeneous receivers. Transmission of scalable data with prioritization enhances the transmission performance, reducing the sensitivity to network congestions and exploiting the multirate characteristic of scalable coding. Network coding is a novel transmission technique that allows intermediate network nodes to perform coding operations on the information in transit, as opposed to traditional routing. This yields to maximization of the transmission rate and encoding of the information with spatial diversity. We employ an overlay network that uses network coding and delivers scalable video with prioritization. We test the performance of the scalable streaming against a nonscalable system, when the upload bandwidth of the nodes is not known.