A Survey on MPEG-4 Streaming using Network Coding in Wireless Networks

The streaming of real-time audio/video data is very challenging because of the time-varying and unreliable wireless channels, video content characteristics, limited bandwidth, dynamic topology, heterogeneous and distributed environment and high packet loss rate because of wireless interference and channel fading. Because of such open issues present in wireless networks, it is very difficult to satisfy the requirements of audio/video streaming applications such as low delay, low packet loss, jitter control etc. In such scenarios of opportunistic networks where real time data is being streamed from server node to client node, Network Coding and its variants can be used by such nodes to meet different requirements. Network coding changes the role of such multimedia nodes from store and forward to encode data packets. Encoding process includes mathematical operations on data packets. This survey paper has considered number of speculative and practical approaches and cases where network coding or its variant applied either fully or partially on multimedia traffic with the aim to improve performance and to provide protection against packet losses. This review has mainly focused on the opportunity of performance enhancement of MPEG-4 traffic over Wireless Network using Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC) with Multi Generation Mixing (MGM). Using Multi Generation Mixing, packets of greater importance has got more protection, less loss, more reconstruction and recovery of real time data.