Adaptive and ubiquitous video streaming over Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

In recent years, with the dramatic improvement on scalability of H.264/MPEG-4 standard and growing demand for new multimedia services have spurred the research on scalable video streaming over wireless networks in both industry and academia. Video streaming applications are increasingly being deployed in Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs). However, robust streaming of video over WMNs poses many challenges due to varying nature of wireless networks. Bit-errors, packet-losses and burst-packet-losses are very common in such type of networks, which severely influence the perceived video quality at receiving end. Therefore, a carefully-designed error recovery scheme must be employed. In this paper, we propose an interactive and ubiquitous video streaming scheme for Scalable Video Coding (SVC) based video streaming over WMNs towards heterogeneous receivers. Intelligently taking the benefit of path diversity, the proposed scheme initially calculates the quality of all candidate paths and then based on quality of path it decides adaptively the size and level of error protection for all packets in order to combat the effect of losses on perceived quality of reconstructed video at receiving end. Our experimental results show that the proposed streaming approach can react to varying channel conditions with less degradation in video quality.