Increasing User Perceived Quality by Selective Load Balancing of Video Traffic in Wireless Networks

Abstract

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are becoming increasingly popular mostly due to their deployment flexibility. The main drawback of these networks is their lack of guaranteeing high Quality of Service (QoS) levels to their clients. The latest ubiquitous mobile and wireless support and significant growth in smartphone features have fueled user demand for rich media services on their devices. Unfortunately, this traffic increase puts additional pressure on WMN resources, eventually affecting user QoS levels and providing solutions to address this is highly challenging. This paper shows how by using ViLBaS, an innovative selective load balancing solution for video deliveries in WMN, increased QoS levels of remotely transmitted video are obtained. ViLBaS employs distributed monitoring of network traffic, identifies the node most affected by congestion and prevents imminent packet drops by rerouting the video flows around the congested node. A hybrid simulation-emulation-based test-bed is built and used for assessing ViLBaS performance in comparison with clas-sic solutions employing the best-known routing metrics. Real video traffic was transmitted from a sever to a client over a WMN topology and the received video quality was assessed in different scenarios. The results demonstrate that ViLBaS outperforms all other solutions when delivering various video content with diverse characteristics and at different quality levels.

An energy-efficient mechanism for increasing video quality of service in Wireless Mesh Networks

“…LBIS represents a distributed QoS-enhanced multimedia delivery solution that combines principles of video load balancing (ViLBaS [7]) and efficient usage of the available interfaces a node is equipped with (ABI [8]). …”

“…Once the number of packets stored in the video queue of a node has reached a threshold, the node is considered congested and LBIS is employed. LBIS is designed to choose the best action based on the congested node's condition: either to re-route selected flows through another set of less congested mesh nodes (by applying the ViLBaS mechanism [7]), or to use the available interfaces of the node (by applying the ABI solution [8]). It is worth noting that using a second interface has less disruption on the video delivery than employing re-routing.…”

“…Figure 2 illustrates the node-level LBIS architecture based on the TCP/IP protocol stack. The LBIS solution resides at the network layer, data-link layer and physical layer, providing a cross-layer framework for enhancing multimedia delivery, by combining the principles of ViLBaS [7] and ABI [8] mechanisms.…”

“…This motivates us to propose a combined LoadBalancing/Interface-Shifting (LBIS) solution, which makes use of both traffic load-balancing [7] and energy-efficient management of the wireless cards a node is equipped with [8]. The aim is to maintain a low overall network energy consumption, while providing high QoS levels to the mesh network users.…”

Fault-Aware Resource Allocation for Heterogeneous Data Sources with Multipath Routing

“…All of these can cause unreliable data transmission, lower effective data rate received successfully at the destination node, and unfairness between different sources [5]. The network performance is significantly degraded by misbehaving nodes particularly for data sources with tight quality-of-service requirements such as real-time provision in city-wide wireless network [6]. How to maintain an acceptable level of network performance degradation for heterogeneous data sources still remains an open problem in the design of a communication network with the presence of misbehaving nodes.…”