Signalling Management to Reduce Roaming Effects over Streaming Services

Multimedia streaming services performance depends on network conditions. To actively adapt streaming flow consumptions, streaming clients and servers estimate the available bandwidth. In recent years, intense research activity has been carried out on the effects of wireless LAN over streaming services. In this paper, the analysis is focused on the effective periods of time during which streaming clients fail to receive data while roaming. The main conclusion is that wireless LAN handoff management produces temporary periods of high packet loss which affect bandwidth estimations. These under estimations reduce service performance during longer periods of time than those caused by the usual handover process. Also, mobile users can produce negative effects on static clients. Based on off-the-shelf WiFi hardware and unmodified commercial streaming clients and servers, a solution to mitigate all these negative effects, based on the pro-active management of signalling control messages between clients and server, is proposed