Packet Loss Recovery in Broadcast for Real-Time Applications in Dense Wireless Networks

Packet loss recovery in wireless broadcast is challenging, particularly for real-time applications which have strict and short delivery deadline. To recover the maximum number of lost packets within a short time, existing packet recovery solutions often rely on instantly decodable network coding (IDNC). Some of these solutions can recover nearly the maximum number of lost packets possible at the cost of collecting feedback from all (or a large percentage of) users. This is impractical in dense networks. In addition, their runtime grows with the number of users, which is not desirable due to the urgent delivery deadline of real-time applications. In this work, we introduce random instantly decodable network coding (RIDNC), a random encoding approach to IDNC. We propose RAndom IDNC Encoder (RACE), a fast RIDNC encoder that can recover nearly as many lost packets as the optimal RIDNC encoder. We compare RACE with the CrowdWiFi encoder, a high performing packet loss recovery solution used in CrowdWiFi, a commercial system for broadcasting live video in dense networks. We show that RACE is up to two orders of magnitude faster than the CrowdWiFi encoder, and recovers more lost packets in practice, where there is not enough time to collect feedback from many users. © 2020 IEEE.