Increasing User Perceived Quality by Selective Load Balancing of Video Traffic in Wireless Networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are becoming increasingly popular mostly due to their deployment flexibility. The main drawback of these networks is their lack of guaranteeing high Quality of Service (QoS) levels to their clients. The latest ubiquitous mobile and wireless support and significant growth in smartphone features have fueled user demand for rich media services on their devices. Unfortunately, this traffic increase puts additional pressure on WMN resources, eventually affecting user QoS levels and providing solutions to address this is highly challenging. This paper shows how by using ViLBaS, an innovative selective load balancing solution for video deliveries in WMN, increased QoS levels of remotely transmitted video are obtained. ViLBaS employs distributed monitoring of network traffic, identifies the node most affected by congestion and prevents imminent packet drops by rerouting the video flows around the congested node. A hybrid simulation-emulation-based test-bed is built and used for assessing ViLBaS performance in comparison with classic solutions employing the best-known routing metrics. Real video traffic was transmitted from a sever to a client over a WMN topology and the received video quality was assessed in different scenarios. The results demonstrate that ViLBaS outperforms all other solutions when delivering various video content with diverse characteristics and at different quality levels.