Network-Adaptive Selection of Transport Error Control (NASTE) for Video Streaming over WLAN

Wireless networks are inherently vulnerable to loss from dynamic wireless channel. Particularly, wireless channel is affected by time-varying fading and interference, which leads to burst packet losses and thus causes severe quality degradation of video streaming. In order to alleviate the effect of losses in the transport layer, the error control schemes such as FEC (forward error correction), ARQ (automatic repeat request), and interleaving are essential. However, since each error control scheme shows different performance according to the transport application and the status of channel, a suitable scheme should be selected and applied. In this paper, we propose a network-adaptive selection of transport error control (NASTE). The proposed mechanism selects a suitable error control mode according to the status of channel and application. To verify the feasibility of the proposed NASTE, we have implemented it over a real IEEE 802.11g WLAN (wireless LAN) environment. The experimental results indicate that the proposed mechanism can enhance the overall transport performance by recovering packet losses.