We don't need no generation - a practical approach to sliding window RLNC

Abstract

Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC) is a popular coding scheme to improve communication over lossy channels. For packet streaming applications (video streaming, general IP streams), recent research has shown that sliding window schemes can improve in-order delay properties compared to the block/-generation based coding. However, implementing sliding window RLNC with a limited coding window poses new challenges in both theoretical and engineering aspects. We introduce the first practical generation-less sliding window RLNC scheme, which is built on existing generation based coders. Through discrete simulation and a proof of concept implementation, we show that, the in-order delay can be improved compared to generation based schemes while retaining the reliability, computational complexity and overhead.