Network Coding for Video Distortion Reduction in Device-to-Device Communications

Abstract: In this paper, we study the problem of distributing a real-time video sequence to a group of partially connected cooperative wireless devices using instantly decodable network coding (IDNC). In such a scenario, the coding conflicts occur to service multiple devices with an immediately decodable packet and the transmission conflicts occur from simultaneous transmissions of multiple devices. To avoid these conflicts, we introduce a novel IDNC graph that represents all feasible coding and transmission conflict-free decisions in one unified framework. Moreover, a real-time video sequence has a hard deadline and unequal importance of video packets. Using these video characteristics and the new IDNC graph, we formulate the problem of minimizing the mean video distortion before the deadline as a finite horizon Markov decision process (MDP) problem. However, the backward induction algorithm that finds the optimal policy of the MDP formulation has high modelling and computational complexities. To reduce these complexities, we further design a two-stage maximal independent set selection algorithm, which can efficiently reduce the mean video distortion before the deadline. Simulation results over a real video sequence show that our proposed IDNC algorithms improve the received video quality compared to the existing IDNC algorithms.