Enhancing abstract multiparty transport through Network Coding

In recent years there has been an increasing interest in multiparty multimedia services that, associated with the new trends in content consumption (e.g. mobility, heterogeneity, high-definition), raised novel challenges. This fact motivates the research towards new techniques that are capable of improving the user experience while simultaneously making a rational use of the network resources. Network Coding (NC) is one of those techniques. It has gained a notorious relevance due to its ability to optimize network throughput and resilience to packet losses. In this work we propose a context-driven framework for multiparty content delivery using NC to enhance the reliability of the services provided. We propose and evaluate two different approaches: a static one, where the level of redundancy remains constant, and a dynamic one, where the control framework autonomously adjusts the redundancy to the sensed quality of service, deriving coding parameters from network context information. We found that while the static scheme achieves better results in terms of recovered information, it comes at the cost of sometimes excessive redundant information. On the other hand, tuning NC with context parameters in the dynamic scheme saves more network resources with a small penalty in the recovered information.