Scalable Video Streaming for Single-Hop Wireless Networks Using a Contention-Based Access MAC Protocol

Limited bandwidth and high packet loss rate pose a serious challenge for video streaming applications over wireless networks. Even when packet loss is not present, the bandwidth fluctuation, as a result of an arbitrary number of active flows in an IEEE 802.11 network, can significantly degrade the video quality. This paper aims to enhance the quality of video streaming applications in wireless home networks via a joint optimization of video layer-allocation technique, admission control algorithm, and medium access control (MAC) protocol. Using an Aloha-like MAC protocol, we propose a novel admission control framework, which can be viewed as an optimization problem that maximizes the average quality of admitted videos, given a specified minimum video quality for each flow. We present some hardness results for the optimization problem under various conditions and propose some heuristic algorithms for finding a good solution. In particular, we show that a simple greedy layer-allocation algorithm can perform reasonably well, although it is typically not optimal. Consequently, we present a more expensive heuristic algorithm that guarantees to approximate the optimal solution within a constant factor. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed framework can improve the video quality up to 26% as compared to those of the existing approaches