A zero-overhead error-correcting nVoD schema

In this paper we present a novel multicast near-Video on Demand (nVoD) coding schema, which relies on the intrinsic redundancy of the underlying nVoD protocol to provide implicit error correction, by employing content segments as blocks for coding operations. As a result, this implicit error correction has zero overhead, unlike the direct application of error-correcting codes, which increase content bitrate in the same proportion as target error probability. The findings in this paper indicate that our proposal outperforms previous approaches with explicit error correction (error protection within content segments) in terms of transmission bandwidth for the same packet loss probability. We present an analytical approach that can be used to tune implicit error correction (coding matrix selection), which we validate with simulations. We also simulate the impact of the coding schema on two different nVoD protocols, fast broadcasting (FB) and recursive frequency splitting (RFS). Finally, we show the benefits of applying this schema to a real scenario with WiMax transport. © 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.