Reliable videos broadcast with network coding and coordinated multiple Access Points

Abstract

As the popularity of wireless devices (e.g. smartphones and tablets) increases, watching videos over the Internet is becoming a main device application. Two important challenges in wireless communications are the unreliability of the wireless links and the interference among the wireless links. In order to exploit reliable video multicast, forward error correction and network coding can be used. In this paper, we propose a reliable video multicast method over wireless networks with multiple Access Points (AP). Using multiple APs, the multicast receivers can benefit from both spatial and time diversities, which results in more reliable transmissions. In order to utilize the shared wireless network efficiently, we propose a resource allocation algorithm. We show that a systematic concurrent transmission of the interfering AP nodes can enhance the total system performance and provide fairness to the client nodes. Therefore, in contrast with the previous resource sharing methods, which only permit the AP nodes that do not interfere with each other to transmit concurrently, we allow the interfering nodes to transmit concurrently, and we propose a two-phase resource allocation algorithm to further enhance the system utility. We show the effectiveness of our proposed method through extensive simulations.