Network coding based mechanism to provide reliable multimedia content distribution in harsh environments

Multimedia services distribution is very dependent on the quality of the communications link. Due to the nature of the related services, these are usually very sensitive to packet loss, delay and jitter, and hence service quality is immediately worsen in harsh scenarios. This paper proposes an OSI-Layer2 cooperative link layer scheme (known as GalaReS) that remarkably improves the multimedia content distribution in realistic scenarios (under interferences, packet loss and time-varying channel conditions). To that end, the proposed scheme takes the advantage of a Network Coding based link layer scheme, where the cooperation among networked nodes provides a remarkable link stability under lossy conditions. Experimentation phase compares the performance achieved by the proposed scheme, compared to the legacy ones, under different interference patterns. Results demonstrate the validity of the Network Coding based scheme to distribute high quality multimedia services in realistic harsh scenarios.