Multicast and unicast real-time video streaming over wireless LANs

Abstract

We address the problem of real-time video streaming over wireless LANs for both unicast and multicast transmission. The wireless channel is modeled as a packet-erasure channel at the IP level. For the unicast scenario, we describe a novel hybrid Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) algorithm that efficiently combines forward error control (FEC) coding with the ARQ protocol. For the multiple-users scenario, we formulate the problem of real-time video multicast as an optimization of a maximum regret cost function across the multicast user space. The proposed solution efficiently combines progressive source coding with FEC coding. We present a theoretical analysis of the unicast and multicast cases, as well as experimental results that demonstrate the performance advantages of the proposed algorithms over existing methods.