A novel approach towards QoS provisioning in delay-sensitive flows over wireless networks

Wireless networks are poised to support a myriad of existing as well as emerging multimedia streaming applications. With increase in use of wireless local area networks (WLANs), ranging from simple data transfer to bandwidth-intense, delay-sensitive, and loss-tolerant multimedia applications, issues regarding quality of service (QoS) have become a major research endeavor. Several challenges posed by robust video streaming over 802.11 WLANs include coping with packet losses caused by network buffer overflow, link erasures, or deadline misses. A major observation is that the retry limit settings of the MAC layer can be optimized in a way such that the overall packet loss caused by link erasure, buffer overflow, or deadline miss is minimized. In this paper, we propose a novel solution for minimizing packet loss in multimedia applications over WLANs. Simulation results justify the improved quality of the received video based on our proposed approach.