Performance of SoftCast and H.265 in software radio video multicasting systems

Wireless video distribution to multiple users suffers from the heterogeneity problem, which often results in sacrificing the video quality in order to cover a larger geographic area. The SoftCast system devised by Jakubczak and Katabi allows, in such scenarios, the delivery of a video stream with embedded graceful degradation capabilities. With the current emergence of Software Defined Radio (SDR) systems, video communications can take profit of physical layer waveform flexibility added to the ease of reprogrammability, even at the higher layer levels. In this paper, we compare the performance of SoftCast with the latest H.265 video encoding standard, in order to show its advantages. Moreover, we also present the results of an implementation of the SoftCast system using SDR devices.