Game theoretical analysis of wireless multiview video multicast using cooperative peer-to-peer repair

Receivers of wireless video broadcast can suffer catastrophic decoding errors when experiencing heavy packet losses due to transmission channel fades. Cooperative repair schemes, exploiting the "uncorrelatedness" in wireless channels of peers physically located more than one transmission wavelength apart, call for neighboring peers listening to the same video stream to locally share received packets via a secondary network. Since the likelihood of the entire peer group suffering fades in statistically independent channels at the same time is very small, cooperative peers can collectively recover lost packets via local packet sharing with high probability. For interactive multiview video streaming (IMVS), where a client receives and watches only one periodically selected view out of N available, the packet recovery problem is more challenging, since the likelihood of a neighboring cooperative peer watching the same view as a channel-corrupted peer is now 1/N. To enable cooperative recovery even when neighboring peers are watching different but correlated video views, cleverly designed redundantly coded in formation (RCI) such as Distributed Source Coded (DSC) frames are inserted into streams of different views. On one hand, RCI in the video streams promotes cooperative repair among peers watching different views; on the other, it leaves fewer available bits for channel coding, given a fixed transmission budget, to combat channel noise. In this paper, using game theoretical analysis, we search for the optimal amount of RCI in the video streams to foster the right balance between cooperation among peers and leftover bits for channel coding to maximize decoding success. Experimental results show that expected video decoding probability can be increased noticeably compared to non-optimized resource allocation schemes.