Network Coding and Media Streaming (Invited Paper)

Network coding has recently emerged as an alter- native to traditional routing algorithms in communication systems. In network coding, the network nodes combine the packets they receive before forwarding them to the neighbouring nodes. Intensive research efforts have demon- strated that such a processing in the network nodes can provide advantages in terms of throughput or robustness. These potentials, combined with the advent of ad hoc and wireless delivery architectures have triggered the interest of research community about the application of the net- work coding principles to media streaming applications. This paper describes the potentials of network coding in emerging delivery architectures such as overlay or peer- to-peer networks. It overviews the principles of practical network coding algorithms and outlines the challenges posed by multimedia streaming applications. Finally, it provides a survey of the recent work on the application of network coding to media streaming applications, both in wireless or wired communication scenarios. Promising results have been demonstrated but delay and complexity constraints are still posed as the main challenging issues that prevent the wide-scale deployment of network coding algorithms in multimedia communication systems.