Preserving streaming video quality in mobile wireless LAN networks

Handoffs between access points in a distributed IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN network for vehicular users can be a source of considerable packet loss. This severely degrades the visual quality of streaming video applications. In this paper we introduce the architecture of an Ethernet soft switch, which tries to preserve the quality of high bit rate streaming video upon each handoff, even if only limited resources are available access points. We have evaluated its performance in a test bed implementation for MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and H.264 video-on-demand and have compared it to the standard IEEE 802.11 F-IAPP approach