Cross-Packet Coding for Delay-Constrained Streaming Applications

Delay-constrained streaming from a moving platform is of paramount importance for applications such as the remote control of drones, where a low-delay video stream is required in order to provide visual feedback to the pilot while providing high quality video at playback. In this letter we propose a scheme based on cross-packet coding for delay-constrained streaming over block fading channels with channel state information at the receiver only. The proposed scheme largely enhances upon a memoryless transmission approach in terms of average decoded rate and provides increased protection to packets transmitted earlier within a block, which is useful for successively compressed sources such as IPPPP video streams. The proposed scheme approaches the asymptotic upper bound over a wide range of SNR already for blocks with size of practical relevance and has a comparatively low complexity.