A Seamless Playback Mechanism for Mobile Multicast Streaming Video in IEEE 802.11-Based Wireless Mesh Networks

As the fast growth in the development of the related technologies, IEEE 802.11-based wireless mesh networks (WMNs) will be widely deployed as the access networks in community or campus environments. In this kind of WMNs, the playback of multicast streaming video (such as IPTV) could be discontinued due to the handoff process of the mobile stations. In this paper, practical system architecture for providing multicast streaming video services with a novel mechanism to achieve seamless playback during the handoff process is proposed. In the proposed mechanism, a handoff decision algorithm, instead of the traditional method using RSSI, is proposed to reduce the bandwidth overhead in forwarding video stream data. The simulation results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.