Offloading Performance Evaluation for Network Coding-based Cooperative Mobile Video Streaming

Nowadays, video streaming has became one of the most popular multimedia applications and will be the dominant data traffic in cellular networks. This is a real challenge for mobile network operators because the cellular base stations will be overloaded. One promising solution to offload mobile traffic from the base stations is the use of Device-to-Device (D2D) communications. Each mobile phone can use both cellular and Wi-Fi network interfaces to download video segments either from the Internet or from a neighboring device. However, it is crucial to improve the reliability of D2D communications to maximize the offloading benefits. In this paper, we use network coding to address the reliability in cooperative D2D-based transmission of video streaming. We have implemented Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC) on the CoopStreaming system and evaluate the offloading gain. The experimental results show that the use of network coding has significantly improved the reliability of D2D communications among neighboring devices and therefore increased the cellular offloading gain.