Enhancing the performance of Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) for video transmission in context with IEEE 802.11

Abstract

In recent years, multimedia streaming has increased dramatically in wireless networks. Transmission of streaming video over Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) faces some challenges such as bandwidth guarantee. The packet loss and delay increases due to high data rate flow over a shared medium in a multi-hop manner. Real-time live surveillance applications usually use Forward Error Control (FEC) technique for reliable transmission of video signals. Sending the video over WMN causes degradation in Quality of Service (QoS) parameters such as Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), end-to-end delay, throughput, which determine the quality of delivered video. This paper proposes an improved Medium Access Control (MAC) based on medium reservations called Enhanced Mesh Deterministic Access (EMDA). It is a per-node reservation of a block of contiguous transmission opportunities. EMDA significantly improves the optional MDA MAC to provide a much higher video call capacity and much less MDA signalling overhead. Extensive simulations are carried out with the proposed scheme using Network Simulator 2 (NS-2). The results of simulation demonstrate that the proposed scheme significantly improves the end-to-end delay performance of real-time traffic, Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), jitter and system throughput, as compared with Delivery Traffic Indication Message (DTIM) scheme.