Performance evaluation of video streaming in multihop wireless mesh networks

Abstract

Supporting multimedia services in wireless mesh networks is receiving more attention from the research community. While wired networks have mature infrastructure and protocols providing QoS for multimedia, supporting multimedia in multihop wireless mesh networks faces greater technical challenges. The unreliable nature and shared media of multihop communications make the deployment of multimedia applications in wireless mesh networks a difficult task. To identify and understand the issues and problems of providing multimedia in multihop wireless mesh networks, we take video streaming as an example, setting up a real testbed to conduct extensive experiments in various scenarios and analyze its performance. In contrast to simulation or network-layer statistics based studies, our investigation is directly focused on video quality in multihop scenarios. The results better represent real networks and reveal interesting aspects of video performance in multihop wireless mesh networks, which we believe is helpful in designing efficient QoS solutions for multimedia services in the wireless mesh networks.