Design of an Active Set Top Box in a Wireless Network for Scalable Streaming Services

Abstract

The popularity of multimedia streaming services via wireless home networks has confronted major challenges in quality improvement for services through a set top box (STB). Even though scalable methods have been suggested to enhance the quality of multimedia streaming services, it is still challenging how to provide scalable streaming services in wireless home networks. Previous studies on scalable streaming services eliminate the corrupted stream at the multimedia client. In this paper, we propose a new method, ActiveSTB, which removes the distorted or unsuitable multimedia data early to save frugal resources. We use a network simulation tool, NS-2, to evaluate our method with various range of cross traffic and error rates. The simulation results show that ActiveSTB support 12.5% to 40% more packets than the original STB for all ranges of cross traffic and error rates.