Packet Loss Recovery in Broadcast for Real-Time Applications in Dense Wireless Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces RACE, a fast and efficient random encoding method for packet loss recovery in dense wireless broadcast networks, outperforming existing solutions in speed and recovery rate for real-time applications.

Contribution

The paper proposes RACE, a lightweight RIDNC encoder that nearly matches optimal recovery and significantly improves speed over existing high-performance encoders.

Findings

RACE recovers more lost packets than CrowdWiFi in practice.

RACE is up to 100 times faster than CrowdWiFi encoder.

RACE performs well without extensive feedback collection.

Abstract

Packet loss recovery in wireless broadcast is challenging, particularly for real-time applications which have strict and short delivery deadline. To recover the maximum number of lost packets within a short time, existing packet recovery solutions often rely on instantly decodable network coding (IDNC). Some of these solutions can recover nearly the maximum number of lost packets possible at the cost of collecting feedback from all (or a large percentage of) users. This is impractical in dense networks. In addition, their runtime grows with the number of users, which is not desirable due to the urgent delivery deadline of real-time applications. In this work, we introduce RIDNC, a random encoding approach to IDNC. We propose RACE, a light RIDNC encoder that can recover nearly as many lost packets as the optimal RIDNC encoder. We compare RACE with the CrowdWiFi encoder, a high performing packet loss recovery solution used in CrowdWiFi, a commercial system for broadcasting live video in dense networks. We show that RACE is up to two orders of magnitude faster than the CrowdWiFi encoder, and recovers more lost packets in practice, where there is not enough time to collect feedback from many users.