Retransmission-aware queuing and routing for video streaming in wireless mesh networks

The dynamic and shared nature of wireless medium imposes an adverse barrier to supporting QoS for video streaming applications in wireless networks. In this paper, we investigate a case study of video streaming in a wireless mesh network to obtain important observations on the factors which impact video quality in multihop wireless mesh networks. Based on our analysis of the case study, we propose the solutions for enhancing video streaming experience in wireless mesh networks from a cross-layer perspective which leverage the information across network (routing) layer and link (MAC) layer. The MAC layer retransmission count is exploited to guide the interface queue management for video packets. In addition, this retransmission count is also used as a metric to construct a retransmission-aware QoS routing scheme for video streams. In our approach, the upper layers are aware of the dynamic network status via retransmission count, so timely QoS decision can be made to enhance video quality effectively. Simulation results demonstrate the proposed solutions improve video streaming quality significantly compared with the existing schemes.