Bandwidth Estimation in Wireless Lans for Multimedia Streaming Services

Abstract

The popularity of multimedia streaming services via wireless networks presents major challenges in the management of network bandwidth. One challenge is to quickly and precisely estimate the available bandwidth for the decision of streaming rates of layered and scalable multimedia services. Previous studies based on wired networks are too burdensome to be applied to multimedia applications in wireless networks. In this paper, a new method, IdleGap, is suggested to estimate the available bandwidth of a wireless LAN based on the information from a low layer in the protocol stack. We use a network simulation tool, NS-2, to evaluate our new method with various ranges of cross-traffic and observation times. Our simulation results show that IdleGap accurately estimates the available bandwidth for all ranges of cross-traffic (100 Kbps ∼ 1 Mbps) with a very short observation time of 10 seconds.

An approximate stochastic analysis of the packet‐pair probing technique for available bandwidth estimation

“…The software used to test the model was based on simple queuing assumptions which may not perfectly represent many real network components: In particular, a single raw bandwidth and FIFO-queuing at each node, assumptions which are not universally valid in access networks and wi-fi [4]. The model (and its successors) will need to be verified using a more realistic network simulator and/or hardware components.…”

Adaptive Cross-Layer Video Streaming Over Wireless LAN

“…Rather, all the losses will occur inside the VBN box. Several mechanisms exist for the run-time estimation of the available AP capacity and the consequent dynamic control of the throttling function, e.g., [17], [18], [19], [20]. However, the details of this estimation are outside the scope of the present paper.…”

“…Further details on this topic are detailed in [18]- [20]. We then describe the Q-learning approach used in the CLD and applied to the medical video streaming.…”

Optimized Cross-Layer Design for Scalable Video Transmission Over the IEEE 802.11e Networks

“…The main role of the bandwidth estimation is to passively measure the network condition during a macro interval and provide estimation of available capacity that a node can access in the next macro interval. There are several methods proposed in the literature, from the earlier work of Cprobe [24], to some popular proposals of Spruce [25], Pathload [26], to some recent development of Probegap [27], wireless traffic probe [28] and IdleGap [29]. While many of them deal with bandwidth estimation of a communication path in a wide area network (WAN), wireless traffic probe and IdleGap are specifically designed for the IEEE 802.11 DCF MAC protocol with different approaches.…”

“…Our design adopts IdleGap [29] to estimate the network bandwidth availability. However, the estimated available bandwidth will be shared among all nodes, thus the bandwidth accessible by each node is usually lower.…”