Performance Evaluation of Video Streaming over Multi-hop Wireless Local Area Networks

Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) has become the application that drives the Internet to a new height. However, challenges still remain in IPTV in-home distribution. The high-quality video streaming in IPTV services demands home networks to deliver video streaming packets with stringent Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements. Currently, most service providers recommend Ethernet-based broadband home networks for IPTV. However, many existing houses are not wired with Ethernet cables and the rewiring cost is prohibitively expensive. Therefore, wireless solutions are preferred if their performance can meet the requirements. IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks (WLANs) are pervasively adopted in home networks for their flexibility and affordability. However, through our experiments in the real environment, we found that the conventional single-hop infrastructure mode WLANs have very limited capacity and coverage in a typical in-door environment due to high attenuation and interference. The single-hop wireless networks cannot provide support iv for high-quality video streaming to the entire house. Multi-hop wireless networks are therefore used to extend the coverage. Contrary to the common believes that adding relay routers in the same wireless channel should reduce the throughput, our experiment, analysis and simulation results show that the multi-hop IEEE 802.11 WLANs can improve both the capacity and coverage in certain scenarios, and sufficiently support high-quality video streaming in a typical house. In this research, we analyzed and evaluated the performance of H.264-based video streaming over multihop wireless networks. Our analysis and simulation results reveal a wide spectrum of coverage-capacity tradeoff of multi-hop wireless networks in generic scenarios. Moreover, we discuss the methods of how to further improve video streaming performance. This research provides the guidance on how to achieve the optimal balance for a given scenario, which is of great importance when deploying end-to-end IPTV services with QoS guarantee.