Bandwidth-Efficient Packet Scheduling for Live Streaming With Network Coding

Network coding (NC) brings substantial improvements in terms of throughput and delay in collaborative media streaming applications. A key aspect of NC-driven live peer-to-peer streaming is the packet scheduling policy. Indeed, lack of synchronization among peers usually results in significantly redundant packet transmission, which in turn leads to severe bandwidth inefficiencies. In this paper, we address the problem of finding a suitable asynchronous packet scheduling policy that greatly helps to overcome this critical redundant transmission problem. We propose a bandwidth cost minimization technique under a full video packet recovery constraint. In order to add scalability and improved performance, we also further derive a distributed packet scheduling algorithm. Both implementation and analytical considerations of the proposed approaches are described in this paper. Experimental results confirm that the proposed algorithms deliver higher bandwidth efficiency with reduced redundancy and communication overhead rate and, consequently, better quality-of-service in terms of improved video quality and delivery ratio.