Melisa Junuzovic

By Aleš Švigelj and Melisa Junuzović

Video-streaming services, such as Internet protocol television, promising the delivery of multimedia contents over wireless access networks to clients whenever and wherever, are becoming more and more popular. However, scarce radio resources, lossy characteristics of wireless links and high bandwidth demands pose the never-ending challenges for provisioning of real-time streaming services over wireless networks in a timely and reliable manner. Furthermore, a wireless channel may suffer from interference and multipath fading, which may cause random packet losses. In addition, wireless link layer does not provide a retransmission mechanism for multicast/broadcast traffic. This would significantly impact the clients’ quality of experience of streaming services. Traditional unicast retransmission solutions improve client’s quality, at the bandwidth expense, because every lost packet must be retransmitted separately. This chapter presents and practically evaluates a retransmission scheme for video-streaming services over last mile wireless networks. It is based on network coding techniques that increase the overall performance by means of reducing the number of physical transmissions, in comparison to traditional unicast retransmission approach, resulting in reduced bandwidth consumption. Thus, the Internet service providers can increase the number of clients over the same infrastructure or, alternatively, offer more services to the clients.

Part of the book: Broadband Communications Networks