Experiment on Multiple Video Streaming in Wireless Home Networks

Goal of the reported experiment was to determine in which way wirelessly transmitted video streams influence each other. Former experiments gave the impression that the behavior of video streams is unpredictable, e.g. due to unstable play-back and uncertain starts. To transport two video streams simultaneously over a wireless/wired network, the video servers use different network protocols (TCP and RTP) and variants of video bandwidth adaptation algorithms; none, random drop and I-frame Delay (IFD), a special scheduling algorithm for MPEG streams. The access point was operating in congestion mode. Even under these extremely bad network conditions, IFD still offers the highest flexibility in combination with TCP. In contrast, the performance of the server using RTP was topology dependent. The servers with no adaptation showed the infeasibility of complete TCP transmission for real-time media. The TCP/random drop server opened the possibility of a non-complete TCP transmission which was exploited in the TCP/IFD server.