Video Multicast over Heterogeneous Networks Based on Distributed Source Coding Principles

Real-time multimedia multicast over wireless networks is an exciting application that has generated a lot of interest recently. Its main challenge lies in the stringent bandwidth and time-delay requirements of real-time multimedia and severe impairments of the wireless channels. We develop a system for multimedia multicast over wireless-wireline networks, that leverages the knowledge on network information theory, multimedia processing, error control, and networking. In particular, the encoded multimedia data are broadcast to multiple Internet servers over a wireless channel. Each server merely compresses the signal it has received using distributed source coding. The receiver collects bitstreams from the servers before performing joint decoding. Due to spatial diversity gain and distributed source coding, our system significantly outperforms conventional solutions.