A Quality-Driven Cross-Layer Solution for MPEG Video Streaming Over WiMAX Networks

Extensive efforts have been focused on deploying broadband wireless networks. Providing mobile users with high speed network connectivity will let them run various multimedia applications on their wireless devices. Satisfying users with different quality-of-service requirements while optimizing resource allocation is a challenging problem. In this paper, we discuss the challenges and possible solutions for transmitting MPEG video streams over WiMAX networks. We will briefly describe the MPEG traffic model suggested by the WiMAX Forum. A cross-layer solution for enhancing the performance of WiMAX networks with respect to MPEG video streaming applications is explained. Our solution uses the characteristics of MPEG traffic to give priority to the more important frames and protect them against dropping. Besides, it is simple and compatible with the IEEE 802.16 standards and thus easily deployable. It is shown that the proposed solutions will improve the video quality over WiMAX networks.     

A scalable multimedia QoS architecture for ad hoc networks

Communication demands have grown from separate data and voice to integrated multimedia, paving the way to converging fixed, mobile and IP networks. Supporting Multimedia is a challenging task for wireless ad hoc network designers. Multimedia forms high data rate traffic with stringent Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. Wireless ad hoc networks are characterized by frequent topology changes, unreliable wireless channel, network congestion and resource contention. Providing scalable QoS is the most important challenge for multimedia delivery over ad hoc networks. We introduce here a provisioning and routing architecture for ad hoc networks which scales well while provisioning QoS. The proposed architecture is analysed using a mix of HTTP, voice and video streaming applications over 54 Mbps 802.11 g-based ad hoc networks. The architecture is simulated and compared to well-known routing protocols using the OPNET Modeller. The results show that our architecture scales well with increase in the network size, and outperforms well-known routing protocols.     

H.264 video transmissions over wireless networks: Challenges and solutions

Multimedia video streaming is becoming increasingly popular. Using multimedia services, there are more and more users in end-system over wireless networking environment. H.264/AVC is now the standard for video streaming because of its high compression efficiency, robustness against errors and network-friendly features. However, providing the desired quality of service or improving the transmission efficiency for H.264 video transmissions over wireless networks present numbers of challenges. In this paper, we consider those challenges and survey existing mechanisms based on the protocol layers they work on. Finally, we address some open research issues concerning for H.264 video transmission in wireless networks.     

A multi-layer experimental study of multimedia and QoS communication in wireless mesh networks

A significant issue in Mesh networks is to support multimedia transmissions while providing Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees to mobile users. For real-time multimedia streaming, unstable throughput or insufficient bandwidth will incur unexpected delay or jitter, and it remains difficult to provide comprehensive service guarantees for a wireless mesh environment. In this paper, we target the problem of providing multimedia QoS in wireless mesh networks. We design and implement a campus test-bed for supporting multimedia traffic in mobile wireless mesh networks, and investigate in detail some possible improvements on a number of layers to enable multimedia transmission over wireless networks with QoS support. We first study a number of improvements of some existing routing protocols to support multimedia transmissions. Some new admission control and rate control mechanisms are studied and their performance gains are verified in our experiments. In our new cross-layer adaptive rate control (CLARC) mechanism, we adaptively change the video encoder’s output bit rate based on the available network bandwidth to improve the quality of the received video. We also design a mobile gateway protocol to connect the MANET to Internet and a wireless LAN management protocol to automatically manage WLAN to provide some QoS.     

Radio resource management in emerging heterogeneous wireless networks

Deployment of heterogeneous wireless networks is spreading throughout the world as users want to be connected anytime, anywhere, and anyhow. Meanwhile, these users are increasingly interested in multimedia applications such as video streaming and Voice over IP (VoIP), which require strict Quality of Service (QoS) support. Provisioning network resources with such constraints is a challenging task. In fact, considering the availability of various access technologies (WiFi, WiMAX, or cellular networks), it is difficult for a network operator to find reliable criteria to select the best network that ensures user satisfaction while maximizing network utilization. Designing an efficient Radio Resource Management (RRM), in this type of environment, is mandatory for solving such problems. In order to provide a better understanding of RRM’s design, this paper presents a detailed investigation of key challenges that constitute an efficient RRM framework. More importantly, an overview with a classification of recent solutions, in terms of decision making, is provided along with the discussion.     

Ant-based routing for wireless multimedia sensor networks using multiple QoS metrics

In wireless sensor networks, most routing protocols consider energy savings as the main objective and assume data traffic with unconstrained delivery requirements to be a given. However, the introduction of video and imaging sensors unveils additional challenges. The transmission of video and imaging data requires both energy efficiency and QoS assurance (end-to-end delay and packet loss requirements), in order to ensure the efficient use of sensor resources as well as the integrity of the information collected. This paper presents a QoS routing model for Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSN). Moreover, based on the traditional ant-based algorithm, an ant-based multi-QoS routing metric (AntSensNet) is proposed. The AntSensNet protocol builds a hierarchical structure on the network before choosing suitable paths to meet various QoS requirements from different kinds of traffic, thus maximizing network utilization, while improving its performance. In addition, AntSensNet is able to use a efficient multi-path video packet scheduling in order to get minimum video distortion transmission. Finally, extensive simulations are conducted to assess the effectiveness of this novel solution and a detailed discussion regarding the effects of different system parameters is provided. Compared to typical routing algorithms in sensor networks and the traditional ant-based algorithm, this new algorithm has better convergence and provides significantly better QoS for multiple types of services in wireless multimedia sensor networks.     

Editorial

Wireless sensor network(WSN)is characterized by the dense deployment of sensor nodes that continuously observe physical phenomenon.The main advantages of WSN include its low cost,rapid deployment,self-organization,and fault tolerance.WSN has received tremendous interests of various research communities,and significant progresses have been made in various aspects including sensor platform development,wireless communication and networking,signal and information processing,as well as network performance eva...     

Utility-oriented resource allocation for 360-degree video transmission over heterogeneous networks

Immersive media streaming, especially virtual reality (VR)/360-degree video streaming which is very bandwidth demanding, has become more and more popular due to the rapid growth of the multimedia and networking deployments. To better explore the usage of resource and achieve better video quality perceived by users, this paper develops an application-layer scheme to jointly exploit the available bandwidth from the LTE and Wi-Fi networks in 360-degree video streaming. This newly proposed scheme explores the saliency of video contents, prediction of users' view and channel status information to maximize the system's utility in a multi-RAN environment. It also determines the optimal association of users with multiple Wi-Fi access points (APs). Besides, a novel buffer strategy is proposed to mitigate the influence of short-time prediction problem for transmitting 360-degree videos in time-varying networks. The promising performance and low complexity of the proposed scheme and algorithms are validated in simulations with various 360-degree videos.     

Dynamic duty cycle and adaptive contention window based QoS-MAC protocol for wireless multimedia sensor networks

Rapid penetration of small, customized wireless devices and enormous growth of wireless communication technologies has already set the stage for large-scale deployment of wireless sensor networks. While the need to minimize the energy consumption has driven significant researches in wireless sensor networks, offering some precise quality of service (QoS) for multimedia transmission over sensor networks has not received significant attention. However, the emerging new applications like video surveillance, telemedicine and traffic monitoring needs transmission of wireless multimedia over sensor networks. Naturally, offering some better QoS for wireless multimedia over sensor networks raises significant challenges. The network needs to cope up with battery-constraints, while providing improved QoS (end-to-end delay and bandwidth requirement). This calls for a suitable sensory MAC protocol capable of achieving application-specific QoS. In this paper, we have proposed a new QoS-based sensory MAC protocol, which not only adapts to application-oriented QoS, but also attempts to conserve energy without violating QoS-constraints. Performance modeling, analysis and simulation results demonstrate that the proposed protocol is capable of providing lower delay and better throughput, at the cost of reasonable energy consumption, in comparison to other existing sensory MAC protocols.     

率失真优化的无线多跳网络多路径选择算法

随着无线网络技术的发展,基于无线多跳网的视频通信在智能交通、灾难应急和军事指挥等多个领域得到越来越广泛的应用.但是,如何保证无线视频的传输质量,是亟待解决的一个关键问题.已有多路径视频传输研究忽略了信道变化和路径间干扰.针对该问题,提出一种基于率失真预测的多路径选择优化算法.该算法不仅分析了网络拥塞对传输质量的影响,而...     

IP媒体流业务在3G移动网络中的应用

主要从理论上研究了3G网络中使用的一种流媒体的端到端QOS框架，探讨了运用PLMN中的多媒体流业务避免通过外部的IP-PDN访问流业务的可能性。在这个框架的基础上分析了流会话的UMTS和IETF下的协议之间的相互作用。这两组协议可以合作提供无缝的端到端的实时业务。特别是，本文提出P多媒体子系统可以利用实时流协议，将其控制范围从基于SP的业务延伸到基于R御的业务，如多媒体流媒体业务。在提出上述框架的基础上，本文还概括了3C移动网络中的音频流业务的提供。     

QMRPRNS: Design of QoS multicast routing protocol using reliable node selection scheme for MANETs

A mobile Ad-Hoc networks (MANETs) is a continuously self-configuring, infrastructure-less network of wireless mobile devices. In which multicast is one of the efficient way of communication. Currently, several research have been conducted to design multicast routing protocols for wireless mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs). Multicasting is a technique that allow to send the same message to a group of destinations simultaneously. However, it faces several challenges against its implementation in ad-hoc network due to its dynamic nature, lack of bandwidth, short battery lifetime of the mobile devices. The multicast routing protocol MAODV have several constraints as mentioned above. Hence to address these constraints a reliable neighbour nodes selection scheme has been integrated over MAODV. This paper attempt a Quality of Service (QoS) based multicast routing protocol using reliable neighbour nodes selection scheme (QMRPRNS) for same. The simulation has been conducted to compare the performance of the proposed scheme against some existing multicast routing protocols which shows significant improvement over EMAODV and MAODV.     

A robust method for soft IP handover

Multimedia streaming over wireless networks - often called mobile multimedia streaming lets users access music, movie, and news services at any time, regardless of location. Given that multimedia streaming is a key goal of third-generation and future wireless networks, vendors will soon deploy streaming clients in advanced mobile terminals. Current mobile terminals, however, fail to adequately support mobile multimedia communication because wireless networks have high packet-loss rates. To eliminate packet loss during handover, we use a packet path diversity scheme and an end-to-end bicasting mechanism that enables soft IP handover. To offset wireless errors, we use a forward error correction (FEC) scheme and embed it in the bicasting mechanism. Our bicasting method encodes the data stream and then splits it, providing more effective diversity than general bicasting, which sends the same data down both paths.' To support our method, we propose the mobile multimedia streaming protocol (MMSP), a new transport-layer protocol that supports multihoming and bicasting in combination with FEC.     

A Survey of Various Schedulers Used for Fair Bandwidth Allocation in WiMAX: IEEE 802.16

ABSTRACT

Wireless Interoperability for Multiple Access (WiMAX) is one of the emerging fields of high-speed wireless communication that has enormous capabilities due to its range and the connection speed. Like wireless local area networks (LANs), WiMAX networks implement multiple quality of service (QoS) frameworks at the Media Access Control (MAC) level for assured data, voice, and video services. The question of ensuring QoS is basically how to distribute available resources to users in order to satisfy QoS parameters such as latency, jitter and throughput requirements. IEEE 802.16 standard does not have any particular guidelines on scheduling of incoming and outgoing data. This has caught the attention of researchers working on WiMAX. This article discusses the various issues in WiMAX along with a classification of various scheduling approaches based upon the type of scheduler for the sake of better understanding the scheduling problem and analyzing various available theories.     

Building an IP-based community wireless mesh network: Assessment of PACMAN as an IP address autoconfiguration protocol

Wireless mesh networks are experiencing rapid progress and inspiring numerous applications in different scenarios, due to features such as autoconfiguration, self-healing, connectivity coverage extension and support for dynamic topologies. These particular characteristics make wireless mesh networks an appropriate architectural basis for the design of easy-to-deploy community or neighbourhood networks. One of the main challenges in building a community network using mesh networks is the minimisation of user intervention in the IP address configuration of the network nodes. In this paper we first consider the process of building an IP-based mesh network using typical residential routers, exploring the options for the configuration of their wireless interfaces. Then we focus on IP address autoconfiguration, identifying the specific requirements for community mesh networks and analysing the applicability of existing solutions. As a result of that analysis, we select PACMAN, an efficient distributed address autoconfiguration mechanism originally designed for ad-hoc networks, and we perform an experimental study – using off-the-shelf routers and assuming worst-case scenarios – analysing its behaviour as an IP address autoconfiguration mechanism for community wireless mesh networks. The results of the conducted assessment show that PACMAN meets all the identified requirements of the community scenario.     

Interworking of heterogeneous access networks and QoS provisioning via IP multimedia core networks

Moving towards packet networks, where IP will have a prominent role, constitutes nowadays a widely accepted perception of future communications, the first instance of which has begun to materialise with the IP multimedia core network subsystem (IMS). By specification, IMS is the first implementation towards reaching converged communications which allows users to communicate with video, audio and multimedia content, via any fixed, mobile and wireless access network type, with controllable QoS. To enable IMS communications across heterogeneous networks, incorporating UMTS, WLAN and fixed IP access points, 3GPP and ETSI’s TISPAN currently work on schemes for controlling bandwidth allocation at the service level by employing logical interfaces that carry SIP messages. This article analyzes how interconnection between such heterogeneous networks may be performed on real platforms. In this effort, special attention is paid to the way the various interconnection possibilities can affect end-to-end QoS provisioning.     

无线传感器网络中间件技术研究综述

无线传感器网络在受到广泛应用与关注的同时,由于网络复杂度及网络应用的增加,普遍存在缺乏统一开放接口的问题。针对无线传感器网络结构及特点,介绍无线传感器网络中间件技术概念,在全面分析中间件面临的问题与挑战的基础上,比较几种不同设计方法,并且通过典型实例在几个重要性能参数方面进行了对比。最后在中间件QoS机制模型方面提出了一种改进方法。     

一种无线实时流媒体增强型自适应FEC控制机制

无线网络动态的信道特性和带宽有限等特点,使得在无线环境下为流媒体应用提供QoS保证面临更大的挑战。提出一种用于无线实时流媒体传输的增强型自适应前向纠错控制策略,以提高接收方的播放质量。该策略采用跨层设计的方法,根据当前的网络状态,自适应地调整MPEG视频帧的发送速率,在视频源数据和冗余数据之间动态分配网络带宽。仿真结果表明,该策略能使接收方获得最大的可播放帧率,有效提高流媒体传输的可靠性和实时性。     

具有多网络自适应选择的无线宽带视频传输系统

针对移动信道带宽不稳定以及Wi-Fi热点覆盖有限等网络问题,提出了一种可自适应选择第二代移动通信网络(CDMA1X)、第三代移动通信网络(3G-EVDO)及无线局域网(WLAN)的多网络自适应无线视频传输的系统架构,并给出了多网络自适应选择的算法。该算法主要包括多网络的自适应接入、无线异构网络的动态切换以及无线同构网络的自适应选择传输。该方案可实现无线视频的高质量可靠传输。