Performance evaluation of video transmission over 802.11n wireless network: A MAC layer perspective

Real time video transmission over wireless networks is very challenging due to the time-varying channel conditions and video flow characteristics. Quality of experience (QoE) in multimedia traffic has been the focus of extensive research in the recent years. It reflects user´s satisfaction towards a particular service and provides valuable input to the service providers to determine the quality of the overall system. QoE estimation is challenging as it tries to measure a subjective metric where user experience depends on a number of factors that cannot simply be measured. In this paper, the impact of different MAC-level parameters on video QoE over IEEE 802.11n wireless networks is analyzed. Subjective tests to correlate MAC-level parameters with perceived QoE of video traffic were performed. We considered different types of video for the evaluation. The study shows that careful parameterization of MAC-level parameters can improve the QoE for video streaming applications when used over a wireless networks.