Traffic-Aware Video Streaming in Broadband Wireless Networks

With increasing implementation of broadband wireless networks and extensive deployment of multimedia services such as Video on Demand (VoD) or IPTV, the demand for video streaming applications will increase and more people will use their wireless devices to reach numerous video contents available in the Internet. Streaming real-time video in wireless networks is a challenging problem due to the stringent service requirements of video traffic and impairments of wireless channels. Providing the required Quality of Service (QoS) through efficient resource allocation is a complicated problem that service providers are confronting. In this paper, we propose a traffic-aware, cross-layer solution for enhancing the perceived video quality at the end user in wireless networks. Our solution incorporates the characteristics of the MPEG traffic to give more priority to the more important frames and to protect them against dropping when available resources of the network are not sufficient for providing the desired QoS to the traffic flow. It is shown that the proposed solution will improve the perceived video quality over the broadband wireless networks.