QoS Improvement for Video Streaming over MANET Using Network-Coding

Video streaming (like YouTube) services and related applications become more and more widespread. Therefore, video streaming delivery over a mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) becomes a necessity as an important content delivery infrastructure between the user (content consumer) and the content storage node. Furthermore, user mobility impacts the quality of the delivered video and hence new concepts should be considered. Accordingly, the innovative concept on network coding (NC) emerges as a promising approach for improving the video transmission quality mainly in multicast environment. In this paper, we focus on Quality of Service (QoS) improvement for video streaming over MANET using random network coding. Basically, we consider video coded by H264/SVC codec that generates packets with different priorities and uses the IEEE 802.11e MAC for traffic differentiation. A successful transmission of high priority packets leads to enhance the video transmission quality. Accordingly, we propose a transmission scheme to protect high priority packets from being lost. Our approach, named Multicast Scalable Video Transmission using Classification-Scheduling Algorithms and Network Coding over MANET (and denoted MSVT_CSA_NC), adopts a cross layer solution between the H.264/SVC codec, the network and MAC layers. Moreover, our delivery mechanisms based on random network coding ensure high throughput and low network load over MANET. Simulation results confirm the substantial performance improvement brought by our approach.