CHARQ: Cooperative hybrid ARQ for wireless video streaming

Abstract

Forward Error Correction (FEC) coding and Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) are two commonly used techniques to tackle packet erasures in wireless video streaming. To preserve flexibility while reducing end-to-end latency, Hybird ARQ (HARQ) has been proposed as an alternative that combines the advantages of FEC and ARQ. This paper presents Cooperative Hybrid ARQ (CHARQ) that can further boost wireless video streaming quality. CHARQ takes advantage of the fact that, in the wireless environment, broadcast is free (from the sender's point of view) and that errors are location dependent so an intermediate proxy that overhears the source's transmission may transmit on behalf of the source to increase throughput efficiency. Simulation results show improved performance with the aid of cooperative proxies.