EM‐SON: efficient multimedia service over self‐organising Wi‐Fi network

Abstract

This study presents eM-SON, an adaptive framework for providing efficient multimedia services over self-organising, hybrid Wi-Fi networks. In this reconfigurable architecture, multimedia services can be received via a Wi-Fi router, Wi-Fi hotspot, or Wi-Fi direct (i.e. device-to-device) mode. Experimental studies are performed to obtain user equipment (UE) battery discharge and QoS/QoE parameters for adaptive multimedia service (transmission, reception, and playback) over each of these Wi-Fi configurations. These experiments are conducted on different types of UEs (smartphone, tablets) with multimedia content encoded at several quality and scalability levels, and transmitted on each of the Wi-Fi configurations over varying load conditions and dynamic channel allocation. A centrally controlled framework is developed to optimise the multimedia content (adaptive transcoding) and network resource allocation (dynamic Wi-Fi configurations and channel allocation) based on the dynamic UE and network resource constraints. The proposed solution combinedly improves the QoS (throughput, number of retransmissions, and delay), QoE, and energy-efficiency performance of the UEs, while effectively serving an increased number of users in the system.