Sustainable Wireless Delivery for HD-Video Streaming via Short Fountain-Code Assisted UDP

The demands on media streaming such as high-definition (HD) video over wireless networks are persistently increasing. However, fast-improving capabilities of wireless transmission techniques might not well assure the quality of media streaming due to mismatch between conventional TCP/UDP and features of multimedia streaming, in that conventional TCP/UDP cannot effectively balance among the stable throughput, bounded delay, and reliability. To tackle this problem, we propose a short fountain-code assisted UDP scheme for sustainable wireless HD-video streaming. Specifically, we develop a new degree distribution for constructing short fountain codes in contrast to the classic soliton distribution typically fitting long code length, and thus lowering the delay and complexity for decoding. Following the derived new degree distribution, we integrate short fountain codes and UDP to form an efficient transmission control scheme. We conduct a set of experiments to evaluate 1) our proposed degree distribution for short fountain-code construction and 2) the short fountain-code assisted UDP, respectively. Under the short-length constraints and the same redundancy level, fountain codes using our degree distribution achieve lower decoding time and higher success rate compared with those using the classic soliton degree distribution. Moreover, our proposal results in less redundancy to complete the full recovery of data. In experiments for wireless HD-video delivery, when the packet loss rate becomes larger than 10(-3), our short fountain-code assisted UDP can support the video traffic with stable throughput while the performance of TCP is degraded significantly.