Profit-based exclusive-or coding algorithm for data retransmission in DVB-H with a recovery network

The DVB-H standard is developed by ETSI to broadcast digital videos to handheld devices, but data loss is a critical issue due to the broadcast behavior. On the other hand, DVB-IPDC integrates DVB-H with an IP-based wireless network to provide bidirectional communication. We adopt this wireless network to deal with data retransmission and call it a recovery network. The paper argues that network coding can improve retransmission efficiency of the recovery network because DVB-H packet loss often exhibits high correlation. In addition, DVB-H packets may be heterogeneous in the sense that they have different importance. According to these two arguments, the paper considers that DVB-H packets are associated with different profit depending on their importance, and proposes an α-maximum profit network coding problem. It asks the base station in the recovery network to use no more than α coded packets for handheld devices to retrieve the lost DVB-H packets such that the overall profit is the maximum. An efficient exclusive-or coding scheme, namely the PEN algorithm, is proposed to solve this problem. Extensive simulation results also verify the effectiveness of the PEN algorithm.