Network Coding for Efficient Video Multicast in Device-to-Device Communications

Device-to-Device (D2D) communication is one of the critical technologies for the fifth-generation network, which allows devices to communicate directly with each other while increasing transmission rate, but this communication is vulnerable to interference. When video transmission is carried out in an environment with interference, problems such as high packet loss rate, poor quality of the video, and blurred screen may exist. These problems can be effectively solved by redundant coding operations at the source node, but the extra coding operation imposes a heavy computational burden on the source node. In order to alleviate the computational overhead of the source node, reduce transmission delay, and guarantee transmission quality, this paper proposes an efficient video multicast transmission scheme based on Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC) in D2D networks. In the scheme, the receiving devices in the transmission participate in the process of generating repair packets that are used to remedy the loss of encoded packets during transmission. The source node multicasts the encoded video file. The receiving nodes re-encode the received data packets with RLNC and then send them to the network again. The nearby nodes can decode the original data through the encoded or re-encoded data packets. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated through both simulation and real experiments. The experimental results show that compared with the traditional RLNC scheme, this scheme could balance the computation overhead of the mobile devices and reduce the encoding and decoding delay by about 8%. When the packet loss rate is high, the proposed scheme can obtain better video quality than the traditional replication-based scheme.