Robust video communication using random linear network coding with pre-coding and interleaving

With the increasing popularity of online video streaming and broadcasting applications, video transmission has become the most bandwidth consumed application in the Internet. Unless resource utilisation is further optimised, existing networks would not be able to accommodate the forecasted demand for high volume video traffic. Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC) is a promising approach to increase the network throughput and robustness in order to facilitate high volume traffic. However, the performance gain obtained using RLNC decreases when the network packet loss rate increases. In response, this paper proposes to incorporate RLNC with a combined interleaving and a coding technique to improve the effectiveness of generating redundant packet combinations over classical RLNC to enhance the robustness against packet losses. Simulation results illustrate that the proposed method improves the probability of recovering lost data over the classical RLNC and the video transmission simulation results exhibit up to 5dB increase in PSNR and up to 14% increase in VQM utilising the same network resources at the same network conditions.