Scalable Video Streaming Relay for Smart Mobile Devices in Wireless Networks

Abstract

Recently, smart mobile devices and wireless communication technologies such as WiFi, third generation (3G), and long-term evolution (LTE) have been rapidly deployed. Many smart mobile device users can access the Internet wirelessly, which has increased mobile traffic. In 2014, more than half of the mobile traffic around the world was devoted to satisfying the increased demand for the video streaming. In this paper, we propose a scalable video streaming relay scheme. Because many collisions degrade the scalability of video streaming, we first separate networks to prevent excessive contention between devices. In addition, the member device controls the video download rate in order to adapt to video playback. If the data are sufficiently buffered, the member device stops the download. If not, it requests additional video data. We implemented apps to evaluate the proposed scheme and conducted experiments with smart mobile devices. The results showed that our scheme improves the scalability of video streaming in a wireless local area network (WLAN).

Video Dissemination in Untethered Edge-Clouds: A Case Study

“…While this promise is not fulfilled at scale, WiFi/Bluetooth-based communications are the prevalent means. For instance, Haggle [14] is an opportunistic content-sharing system that employs WiFi and Bluetooth links and store-and-forward techniques to cope with network disruption and churn, and Kwon et al [10] make use of WiFi-Direct groups for improved video streaming by letting the GO act as relay/cache between the cellular infrastructure and other group members. There are other non-standard techniques that require "rooted" device extensions to work, e.g., Helgason et al [6] present a middleware for mobile applications that disseminate contents opportunistically over WiFi ad-hoc one-hop links without further infrastructural support, and Microcast [8] uses D2D WiFi/Bluetooth communication in conjunction with 3G/4G to improve the performance of video streaming, but making use of overhearing techniques for WiFi.…”

PlaySharing: A group synchronization scheme for media streaming services in hierarchical WLANs

“…In each experimental network configuration, 7 devices were deployed. By constructing the experimental network() as described above, group synchronization performance can be measured and the effect of multichannel traffic distribution on the HSN can be evaluated. The media used in the experiments was a video with a bit rate of 3587 Kbps, and a length of 9 minutes and 9 seconds.…”

“…This improved scalability, because it distributed media streaming traffic to multiple wireless network channels. We have also proposed a media buffering control scheme to reduce average buffering times between a group owner device and group member devices in a network group, resulting in improved scalability.…”