Network Coding Meets Multimedia: A Review

Abstract

While every network node only relays messages in a traditional communication system, the recent network coding (NC) paradigm proposes to implement simple in-network processing with packet combinations in the nodes. NC extends the concept of "encoding" a message beyond source coding (for compression) and channel coding (for protection against errors and losses). It has been shown to increase network throughput compared to traditional networks implementation, to reduce delay and to provide robustness to transmission errors and network dynamics. These features are so appealing for multimedia applications that they have spurred a large research effort towards the development of multimedia-specific NC techniques. This paper reviews the recent work in NC for multimedia applications and focuses on the techniques that fill the gap between NC theory and practical applications. It outlines the benefits of NC and presents the open challenges in this area. The paper initially focuses on multimedia-specific aspects of network coding, in particular delay, in-network error control, and media-specific error control. These aspects permit to handle varying network conditions as well as client heterogeneity, which are critical to the design and deployment of multimedia systems. After introducing these general concepts, the paper reviews in detail two applications that lend themselves naturally to NC via the cooperation and broadcast models, namely peer-to-peer multimedia streaming and wireless networking.

Best of Both Worlds: Prioritizing Network Coding without Increased Space Complexity

“…As such, it is an alternative to previous approaches that require to calculate distance metrics between sources and sink and require to maintain routing tables [10]. Besides ad hoc networks, the idea of network coding has been applied to peer-to-peer content distribution networks [11]- [13] and multimedia streaming [14].…”

Instantly decodable network coding for real-time scalable video broadcast over wireless networks

“…Network coding has shown great potential to improve throughput, delay, and quality of services in wireless networks [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10]. These merits of network coding make it an attractive candidate for multimedia applications [7][8][9].…”

“…These merits of network coding make it an attractive candidate for multimedia applications [7][8][9]. In this paper, we are interested in utilizing network coding in real-time scalable video applications [11,12], which compress video frames in the form of one base layer and several enhancement layers.…”

“…Random linear network coding (RLNC) and instantly decodable network coding (IDNC) have been adopted over LT and raptor codes in many applications and systems [5, 13, 15-18, 31, 32] due to their abilities of simple extension to general networks and providing better tradeoffs among bandwidth efficiency, complexity, and delay [7]. The works in [13,17,18,33] designed expanding window-based RLNC strategies for scalable video transmission such that coded packets are formed across different numbers of video layers.…”

Rate-distortion-optimized multi-view streaming in wireless environment using network coding

“…The coding coefficients, needed to reconstruct the original packets, are typically sent along the combinations as headers [22][23][24][25], unless more advanced reconstruction schemes are implemented at the receiver side [26,27]. Used as an alternative to traditional routing, NC has proved beneficial to real-time streaming applications, both in terms of maximization of the throughput and in terms of reduction of the effects of losses [28][29][30][31][32][33].…”