Memory and Complexity Analysis of On-the-Fly Coding Schemes for Multimedia Multicast Communications

Abstract

A new class of erasure codes for delay-constraint applications, called on-the-fly coding, have recently been introduced for their improvements in terms of recovery delay and achievable capacity. Despite their promising characteristics, little is known about the complexity of the systematic and non-systematic variants of this code, notably for live multicast transmission of multimedia content which is their ideal use case. Our paper aims to fill this gap and targets specifically the metrics relevant to mobile receivers with limited resources: buffer size requirements and computation complexity of the receiver. As our contribution, we evaluate both code variants on uniform and bursty erasure channels. Results obtained are unequivocal and demonstrate that the systematic codes outperform the nonsystematic ones, in terms of both the buffer occupancy and computation overhead.