Supporting Video Streaming Services in Infrastructure Wireless Mesh Networks: Architecture and Protocols

Abstract

In this paper, we present UPAC, a unified peer-to-peer (P2P) and cache framework for high quality video-on-demand services over infrastructure multi-hop wireless mesh networks. Streaming video in multi-hop wireless networks faces many challenges, e.g., the varying available path bandwidth, interference due to shared medium, the impact of multiple relay nodes, etc. To increase the capacity of streaming services and ensure high video quality, in UPAC, the video content is cached at selected wireless mesh access points (MAPs) inside the mesh network. Furthermore peers help each other on video downloading in a best effort manner to reduce the workload imposed on the servers and networks. This unified framework has the advantages of both the content distribution network approach and peer-to-peer network approach. To obtain optimal video quality, a user device can form the P2P relationship with MAP content cache servers and other user devices. Meanwhile, the client-server relationship is established between the device and the MAP content cache servers. In addition, we propose and compare several methods to select the content cache servers for serving a device and to establish the end-to-end routes between the device and the selected servers. Our preliminary simulation results show that the proposed framework increases the number of users that can be concurrently served in the infrastructure wireless mesh network and improves the received video quality.