Problem Identification and Performance Enhancement of Video Multicast over WLAN

Abstract

Video multicast, streaming real-time videos via multicast, over wireless local area network (WLAN) has been considered a promising solution to share common venue-specific videos. By virtue of the nature of the wireless broadcast medium, video multicast basically enables scale-free video delivery, i.e., it can deliver a common video with the fixed amount of wireless resource regardless of the number of receivers. However, video multicast has not been widely enjoyed in our lives due to three major challenges: (1) power saving-related problem, (2) low reliability and efficiency, and (3) limited coverage.

In this dissertation, we consider three research topics, i.e., (1) identification of practical issues with multicast power saving, (2) physical (PHY) rate and forward erasure correction code (FEC) rate adaptation over a single-hop network, and (3) multi-hop multicast, which deal with the three major challenges, respectively.

Firstly, video multicast needs to be reliably delivered to power-saving stations, given that many portable devices are battery-powered. Accordingly, we investigate the impact of multicast power saving, and address two practical issues related with the multicast power saving. From the measurement with several commercial WLAN devices, we observe that many devices are not standard compliant, thus making video multicast performance severely degraded. We categorize such standard incompliant malfunctions that can result in significant packet losses. We also figure out a coexistence problem between video multicast and voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) when video receivers runs in power saving mode (PSM). The standard-compliant power save delivery of multicast deteriorates the VoIP performance in the same WLAN. We analyze the VoIP packet losses due to the coexistence problem, and propose a new power save delivery scheme to resolve the problem. We further implement the proposed scheme with an open source device driver, and our measurement results demonstrate that the proposed scheme significantly enhances the VoIP performance without sacrificing the video multicast performance.

Second, multi-PHY rate FEC-applied wireless multicast enables reliable and efficient video multicast with intelligent selection of PHY rate and FEC rate. The optimal PHY/FEC rates depend on the cause of the packet losses. However, previous approaches select the PHY/FEC rates by considering only channel errors even when interference is also a major source of packet losses.We propose InFRA, an interference-aware PHY/FEC rate adaptation framework that (1) infers the cause of the packet losses based on received signal strength indicator (RSSI) and cyclic redundancy check (CRC) error notifications, and (2) determines the PHY/FEC rates based on the cause of packet losses. Our prototype implementation with off-the-shelf chipsets demonstrates that InFRA enhances the multicast delivery under various network scenarios. InFRA enables 2.3x and 1.8x more nodes to achieve a target video packet loss rate with a contention interferer and a hidden interferer, respectively, compared with the state-of-theart PHY/FEC rate adaptation scheme. To the best of our knowledge, InFRA is the first work to take the impact of interference into account for the PHY/FEC rate adaptation.

Finally, collaborative relaying that enables selected receiver nodes to relay the received packets from source node to other nodes enhances service coverage, reliability, and efficiency of video multicast. The intelligent selection of sender nodes (source and relays) and their transmission parameters (PHY rate and the number of packets to send) is the key to optimize the performance. We propose EV-CAST, an interference and energy-aware video multicast system using collaborative relays, which entails online network management based on interference-aware link characterization, an algorithm for joint determination of sender nodes and transmission parameters, and polling-based relay protocol. In order to select most appropriate set of the relay nodes, EV-CAST considers interference, battery status, and spatial reuse, as well as other factors accumulated over last decades. Our prototype-based measurement results demonstrate that EV-CAST outperforms the state-of-the-art video multicast schemes.

In summary, from Chapter 2 to Chapter 4, the aforementioned three pieces of the research work, i.e., identification of power saving-related practical issues, InFRA for interference-resilient single-hop multicast, and EV-CAST for efficient multi-hop multicast, will be presented, respectively.