Performance of an adaptive multimedia mechanism in a wireless multi-user environment

Abstract

With the increasing popularity of accessing multimedia services over different wireless networks, researchers have been trying to develop different adaptive multimedia mechanisms in order to mitigate the impact of fluctuating radio resources. This paper considers the case when multiple users stream video over the same IEEE 802.11b WLAN using a newly proposed Signal Strength-based Adaptive Multimedia Delivery Mechanism (SAMMy). SAMMy makes use of the IEEE 802.11k standard and uses estimated signal strength, location, and packet loss as part of its adaptive mechanism in order to increase user perceived quality for multimedia streaming applications in wireless networks. SAMMy is evaluated by modeling and simulations and compared with another adaptive multimedia delivery mechanism TFRC, in terms of aggregate throughput and fairness. The results show that the proposed signal strength-based adaptive multimedia delivery scheme outperforms the other scheme in terms of both throughput and fairness when performing video streaming in WLAN.