Performance Benefits of Network Coding for HEVC Video Communications in Satellite Networks

High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is the latest video encoding standard that achieves much better compression efficiency compared to the earlier encoding standards. Satellite channels have a long round trip time (RTT) making it difficult to use packet acknowledgments. Real-time video streaming applications preclude such packet acknowledgments in satellite networks due to strict delay constraints. We propose a combined use of Turbo Coding (TC) and Network Coding (NC) techniques to achieve better video quality over the noisy satellite links using UDP at the transport layer. We evaluate the performance improvement of turbo network coding (TNC-UDP) over the traditional turbo-coded (TC-UDP) protocol for HEVC video streaming in satellite networks. The simulation results show that compared to TC-UDP, the proposed scheme achieves PSNR improvements ranging from 14-20 dB for poor channel conditions (1-2 dB) for the two selected video sequences.