Energy Savings for Video Streaming Using Fountain Coding

Reducing energy and power consumption is important for many reasons, including extending the lifetime of battery operated devices and reducing energy bills. An important source of energy loss in wireless networks comes from retransmissions of lost packets. Many of the transmission protocols in use today were designed mainly to be used in wired IP networks, and therefore performs bad in wireless scenarios. We present a protocol that more efficiently handles packet losses in wireless network with a special emphasis on video streams, and show that the use of fountain coding can reduce power consumption and save energy, especially in multicast settings. We show that fountain coding minimizes the number of retransmissions in lossy wireless networks. Our initial tests for video multicast scenarios with up to 10 users in networks with high loss rates show that power can be reduced by up to 200%.