Video Transmission Using Network Coding

Network coding is a new technique in the field of information theory and coding theory. This emerging technique offers great benefits in the communication networks such as increased throughput and energy savings. In this paper, we evaluate network coding for video transmission scenarios. In these scenarios, the source nodes encode the video packets, while the intermediate nodes implement network coding before forwarding the encoded packets to the end nodes. Finally, the end nodes decode the received packets in order to recovery the original video. H.264/MPEG-4 AVC is used as the video compression standard in this work. We have used the network simulator (NS-2) for our simulations. Our results show that network coding improves the system throughput, reduces the packet loss and improves the video quality in the end nodes. Keywords—communication networks, information theory, multicast, network coding video streaming.