CodedStream: Live Media Streaming with Overlay Coded Multicast

Multicasting is a natural paradigm for streaming live multimedia to multiple end receivers. Since IP multicast is not widely deployed, many application-layer multicast protocols have been proposed. However, all of these schemes focus on the construction of multicast trees, where a relatively small number of links carry the multicast streaming load, while the capacity of most of the other links in the overlay network remain unused. In this paper, we propose CodedStream, a high-bandwidth live media distribution system based on end-system overlay multicast. In CodedStream, we construct a k-redundant multicast graph (a directed acyclic graph) as the multicast topology, on which network coding is applied to work around bottlenecks. Simulation results have shown that the combination of k-redundant multicast graph and network coding may indeed bring significant benefits with respect to improving the quality of live media at the end receivers.