Broadband wireless video streaming: achieving unicast and multicast IPTV in a practical manner

This paper proposes a versatile IPTV video-streaming scheme that provides high-quality unicast with the aid of repair packets but still supports multicast without repair packets. Prior research on wireless multicast video streaming has addressed the risk of feedback implosion when providing adaptive Forward Error Correction (FEC). This approach has not been adopted by providers, who may either prefer unicast streaming or employ a sufficient level of application-layer FEC to avoid the need for adaptation. Instead in this paper, an adaptive, unicast rateless channel-coding scheme is also run in multicast mode. The paper demonstrates the method and the operating conditions for such a joint unicast/multicast service in terms of data rates and suitable video-content type. Data-partitioned source coding with gradual decoding refresh is adopted in the given scenarios, making for a practical broadband wireless streaming scheme.