Delay-aware fountain codes for video streaming with optimal sampling strategy

The explosive demand for online video from smart mobile devices poses unprecedented challenges to delivering high quality of experience (QoE) over wireless networks. Streaming high-definition video with low delay is difficult mainly due to the stochastic nature of wireless channels and the fluctuating videos bit rate. To address this, we propose a novel delay-aware fountain coding (DAF) technique that integrates channel coding and video coding. In this paper, we reveal that the fluctuation of video bit rate can also be exploited to further improve fountain codes for wireless video streaming. Specifically, we develop two coding techniques: the time-based sliding window and the optimal window-wise sampling strategy. By adaptively selecting the window length and optimally adjusting the sampling pattern according to the ongoing video bit rate, the proposed schemes deliver significantly higher video quality than existing schemes, with low delay and constant data rate. To validate our design, we implement the protocols of DAF, DAF-L (a low-complexity version) and the existing delay-aware video streaming schemes by streaming H.264/AVC and high efficiency video coding (HEVC) standard videos over an 802.11b network on CORE emulation platform. The results show that the decoding ratio of our scheme is 15% to 100% higher than the state of the art techniques.