In-home online entertainment: analyzing the impact of the wireless MAC-transport protocols interference

Online entertainment is now possible at home by means of a plethora of ubiquitous services that can be provided based on wireless technologies such as, for instance, the common Wi-Fi IEEE802.11g network technology. Yet a scarce attention has been devoted to study the impact of wireless MAC layer design choices on the native Internet transport protocols (e.g., TCP, UDP) during the distribution of in-house entertainment contents. We show that the current setting of the maximum number of retransmissions and the queue size in the IEEE802.11 protocol not necessarily corresponds to the optimal choice in this context. Based on the obtained results, we also provide directions in order to find the most efficient MAC layer setting.