Band Codes for Energy-Efficient Network Coding with Application to P2P Mobile Streaming

TL;DR

This paper introduces Band Codes, a novel network coding method that maintains packet degree distribution, reducing decoding complexity and energy consumption, thereby enabling efficient P2P mobile streaming.

Contribution

The paper proposes Band Codes, a new class of network codes that preserve degree distribution, lowering decoding complexity and energy use in mobile environments.

Findings

Band Codes halve decoding complexity compared to conventional schemes.

BC enable practical energy-efficient P2P mobile streaming.

Numerical simulations validate BC's performance and overhead benefits.

Abstract

A key problem in random network coding (NC) lies in the complexity and energy consumption associated with the packet decoding processes, which hinder its application in mobile environments. Controlling and hence limiting such factors has always been an important but elusive research goal, since the packet degree distribution, which is the main factor driving the complexity, is altered in a non-deterministic way by the random recombinations at the network nodes. In this paper we tackle this problem proposing Band Codes (BC), a novel class of network codes specifically designed to preserve the packet degree distribution during packet encoding, ecombination and decoding. BC are random codes over GF(2) that exhibit low decoding complexity, feature limited and controlled degree distribution by construction, and hence allow to effectively apply NC even in energy-constrained scenarios. In particular, in this paper we motivate and describe our new design and provide a thorough analysis of its performance. We provide numerical simulations of the performance of BC in order to validate the analysis and assess the overhead of BC with respect to a onventional NC scheme. Moreover, peer-to-peer media streaming experiments with a random-push protocol show that BC reduce the decoding complexity by a factor of two, to a point where NC-based mobile streaming to mobile devices becomes practically feasible.