Optimizing the Joint Source/Network Coding for Video Streaming over Multi-hop Wireless Networks

Supporting video streaming over multi-hop wireless networks is particularly challenging due to the time-varying and error-prone characteristics of the wireless channel. In this paper, we propose a joint optimization scheme for video streaming over multi-hop wireless networks. Our coding scheme, called Joint Source/Network Coding (JSNC), combines source coding and network coding to maximize the video quality under the limited wireless resources and coding constraints. JSNC segments the streaming data into generations at the source node and exploits the intra-session coding on both the source and the intermediate nodes. The size of the generation and the level of redundancy influence the streaming performance significantly and need to be determined carefully. We formulate the problem as an optimization problem with the objective of minimizing the end-to-end distortion by jointly considering the generation size and the coding redundancy. The simulation results demonstrate that, with the appropriate generation size and coding redundancy, the JSNC scheme can achieve an optimal performance for video streaming over multi-hop wireless networks.