MPEG-4 Streaming using Network Coding in Wireless Network

Abstract

Transmitting delay-sensitive video streaming over wireless network is becoming increasingly popular. However, the transmission of real-time video streaming is very challenging because of the time-varying and unreliable wireless channels, video content characteristics, limited bandwidth, dynamic topology, heterogeneous and distributed environment and high packet loss rate because of wireless interference and channel fading. Because of such open issues present in any wireless network, It is very difficult to meet the requirement of audio and video streaming applications such as low delay, low packet loss, jitter control etc. In such scenarios of networks where real time data is being streamed from server node to client node, Network Coding and its variants can be used by such nodes to meet different requirements. Network coding simply allows to change the role of such nodes from traditional routing or store and forward to encode the data packets. Encoding process includes mathematical operations on data packets. This thesis work has considered number of theoretical and practical scenarios where network coding or it’s variant applied on multimedia traffic with the aim to improve performance and to provide protection against packet losses. This thesis work has mainly focused on the performance enhancement of MPEG-4 traffic over wireless network using Random Linear Network Coding with Multi Generation Mixing (MGM). Using Multi Generation Mixing, packets of greater importance has got more protection, less loss, more reconstruction and recovery of real time data. This thesis work also intended to generate real time MPEG4 traffic (I,B,P frames) using Evalvid utility to avoid the use of video traffic model.