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

The digital video broadcasting‐handheld (DVB‐H) standard is developed by European Telecommunications Standards Institute to broadcast digital videos to handheld devices, but data loss is a critical issue due to the broadcast behavior. On the other hand, DVB‐Internet protocol datacasting (DVB‐IPDC) integrates DVB‐H with an Internet protocol‐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 profit‐based exclusive‐or network coding (PEN) algorithm, is proposed to solve this problem. Extensive simulation results also verify the effectiveness of the PEN algorithm. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.