Traffic Characterization and Modeling for Video Streaming Over Multi-Hop WLANs

Real-time media streaming in wireless network has seen increased demand on the Internet in recent years, and has drawn tremendous attention from both academia and industry as well. Preliminary traffic measurements demonstrate that data traffic in wireless communication also exhibits self-similarity. However, little research on wireless media streaming is seen in publication. The purpose of this paper is to characterize video streaming traffic over multi-hop wireless local area networks. We begin with an investigation of the video streaming data generated using NS simulation for two typical network scenarios. On this basis, we proposed a new gamma distribution based wavelet model for wireless video traffic. Our mathematical analyses show that this model can capture all traffic characteristics of wireless video streaming, including traffic arrival and self-similarity.