Multipoint-to-point communications for SHE surveillance with QoS and QoE management

The bandwidth-hunger applications of SHE (Smart Home Environment) can take advantage of the multipoint-to-point (MPP) connections to aggregate more bandwidth to gain user-perceived Quality of Experience (QoE) and network Quality of Service (QoS). The receiver-centric transport-layer R²CP (Radial Reception Control Protocol) was proposed to resolve the incapability of the MPP communication in conventional TCP and UDP. However, R²CP has no consideration to discriminate the importance in a packet payload which is critical to QoE and brings an issue for critical data packets that may be dropped in great risk of network congestion. In this paper, we thus present P-R²CP (Prioritized R²CP) to effectively decrease the loss ratio of critical data packets in MPP video streaming while the network is congested. P-R²CP is a cross-layer protocol that considers both the transport-layer issues and the media content’s properties in application-layer. Then, an example on MPP-UVS (MPP ubiquitous video surveillance) is presented as UVS is now a very important Internet application that requires QoS/QoE management to protect lives and assets especially in SHE. Our experiments are conducted on different kinds of surveillance videos over MPP links with different bandwidth and packet loss inserted. The experimental results demonstrate that, as the loss of critical packets is decreased by an order and much less critical data packets are dropped, P-R²CP can highly guard not only QoS but also QoE of SHE surveillance video streaming.