Scalable Video Streaming with Fountain Codes

The area of video streaming has seen tremendous growth in recent years due to the enhanced processing power, better compression algorithms, and increased bandwidths in emerging networks. Most of the latest communication standards are IP based, whereas the Internet provides only a best-effort service model and the priority-based service models are only gradually being realized for real-time data. Current research attempts to overcome the effects of video packet losses and delays to provide a better user experience. Multimedia communication over wireless channels is especially difficult due to the fact that the channel conditions are generally poor, in addition to the rapid changes that can occur in the channel. Fountain codes can address some of the challenges in this research area, and can also be combined in innovative ways with the different importance classes of compressed video data.