An Efficient Retransmission Strategy for Wireless Scalable Video Multicast

We consider the problem of a base station multicasting a scalable video source to multiple clients, with the clients requiring different video reconstruction qualities. The base station first transmits the video source packets using hierarchical network coding (HNC). Due to the lossy channels, some clients may not receive sufficient packets to reconstruct the video at its desired quality. These clients will request the base station to retransmit. The goal of the proposed retransmission method is to satisfy all clients' requests with the least number of retransmissions. It further offers a "soft" video reconstruction in that the quality of the reconstructed video keeps improving as the clients receive more packets.