Scalable Video Streaming for Single-Hop Wireless Networks Using a Contention-Based Access MAC Protocol

摘要

Limited bandwidth and high packet loss rate pose a serious challenge for video streaming applications overwireless networks. Even when packet loss is not present, the bandwidth fluctuation, as a result of an arbitrary numberof active flows in an IEEE 802.11 network, can significantly degrade the video quality. This paper aims to enhance thequality of video streaming applications in wireless home networks via a joint optimization of video layer-allocationtechnique, admission control algorithm, and medium access control (MAC) protocol. Using an Aloha-like MACprotocol, we propose a novel admission control framework, which can be viewed as an optimization problem thatmaximizes the average quality of admitted videos, given a specified minimum video quality for each flow. We presentsome hardness results for the optimization problem under various conditions and propose some heuristic algorithmsfor finding a good solution. In particular, we show that a simple greedy layer-allocation algorithm can performreasonably well, although it is typically not optimal. Consequently, we present a more expensive heuristic algorithmthat guarantees to approximate the optimal solution within a constant factor. Simulation results demonstrate that ourproposed framework can improve the video quality up to 26% as compared to those of the existing approaches.