Wireless communication systems are highly prone to channel errors. With video being a major player in Internet traffic and undergoing exponential growth in wireless domain, we argue for the need of a Videoaware MAC (VMAC) to significantly improve the throughput and delay performance of real-time video streaming service. VMAC makes two changes to optimize wireless LAN for video traffic: (a) It incorporates a Perceptual-Error-Tolerance (PET) to the MAC frames by reducing MAC retransmissions while minimizing any impact on perceptual video quality; and (b) It uses a group NACK-based Adaptive Window (NAW) of MAC frames to improve both throughput and delay performance in varying channel conditions. Through simulations and experiments, we observe 56-89% improvement in throughput and 34-48% improvement in delay performance over legacy DCF and 802.11e schemes. VMAC also shows 15-78% improvement over legacy schemes with multiple clients.
ACM Reference Format:Eilwoo Baik, Amit Pande, and Prasant Mohapatra. 2015. Efficient MAC for real-time video streaming over wireless LAN. ACM Trans. Multimedia Comput. Commun.