Pipeline Network Coding for Multicast Streams

This paper studies the performance of pipeline network coding for multicast stream distribution in high loss rate MANET scenarios. Most of the previous network coding implementations have been based on batch network coding, where all blocks in the same batch are mixed together. Batch coding requires that the entire batch is received before decoding at destination. Thus, it introduces high decoding delays that impact the stream reception quality. Instead of waiting for the entire batch (i.e., generation), pipeline network coding encodes/decodes packets progressively. Consequently, pipeline network coding yields several benefits: (1) reduced decoding delay, (2) further improved throughput, (3) transparency to higher layers (UDP, TCP, or other applications), (4) no special hardware support and (5) easier implementation. We show performance gain of pipeline coding compared to batch coding via extensive simulation experiments.