Index Coding at the WiFi Edge: An Implementation Study for Video Delivery

TL;DR

WiCode is a practical platform that employs index coding at the WiFi access point to reduce data transmissions and enhance HTTP video streaming performance at the wireless edge, addressing bandwidth variability issues.

Contribution

This paper introduces WiCode, a novel implementation of index coding for video delivery at the WiFi edge, demonstrating real-world performance improvements.

Findings

Reduced data transmission with WiCode improves video streaming performance.

WiCode's index coding effectively decreases retransmissions and bandwidth usage.

Practical implementation shows measurable gains in real WiFi environments.

Abstract

HTTP based video streaming has become the de facto standard for video content delivery across different video streaming services. However, video content delivery continues to be challenged at the wireless edge by inadequate and highly variable bandwidth. In this paper, we describe WiCode, a platform that improves HTTP based video content delivery at the WiFi edge. WiCode uses coded delivery at the WiFi AP to reduce data transmissions in order to improve the perceived performance of video streaming at the users. WiCode performs index coding on video segments to reduce the number of bits transmitted. Further, it also performs index coding on UDP packets that are retransmitted to reduce the number of bits transmitted. This paper describes the design and implementation of WiCode, and the practical gains achievable due to employing coded delivery in a real system taking into account the overheads introduced by WiCode. The WiCode module at the client side is a browser plugin that does not require any client side device configuration changes. We also show the effect of variable and fixed length segment size on the perceived performance of WiCode.