Distribution of high-definition video in 802.11 wireless home networks

Wireless distribution of multimedia contents through 802.11 networks in the home environment presents a number of advantages which have fueled the interest of industry in recent years, such as simple connectivity and data delivery to a variety of devices. Together with High-Definition (HD) contents, multimedia wireless distribution has been proposed for several applications, such as IPTV and Digital TV distribution for multiple devices in the home environment. However, the quality of wireless multimedia services is deteriorated by random packet losses caused by the changing channel behavior. For these scenarios, we propose in this paper a multicast distribution system for High-Definition video over 802.11 wireless networks based on rate-limited packet retransmission. Unlike previous works, which require on-line calculation of the optimal retransmission strategies, the presented system employs optimal retransmission strategies obtained through an off-line optimization process. This approach, based on Stochastic Dynamic Programming, allows a lower on-line complexity and, when compared to another limited rate ARQ system, offers a higher packet recovery and improvements in video quality for low end-to-end delays requirements.