WiMA: A Novel Wireless Multicast Agent Mechanism for Live Streaming System

The bandwidth bottleneck and the high rate of losing packets are the major obstacles when extending P2P live streaming system to WLAN. To tide over them, a new wireless multicast agent mechanism (WiMA) based on the IP multicast buffering schedule is proposed. Wireless multicast agent gains media data by interacting with wired neighbor peers as a common P2P node, and sends data to other wireless peers in WLAN by means of multicast pushing and multicast patching. A normal wireless peer requests data according to the strategy of "emergent ones first". Experiments show that WiMA can save bandwidth in WLAN obviously with acceptable start delay and satisfied playing continuity.