Performance Analysis and Evaluation of H.264 Video Streaming over Multi-Hop Wireless Networks

Video streaming has become the application that drives the Internet to a new height. In this paper, we analyze and evaluate the performance of H.264-based video streaming over multi-hop wireless local area networks (WLANs). Contrary to common believes that adding relays in the same wireless channel may increase coverage but has to reduce throughput, our analysis and simulation results show a wide spectrum of coverage-capacity tradeoff in generic scenarios and confirm previous measurement observation in specific cases. In addition, the paper provides guidance on how to achieve the optimal balance for a given scenario, which is important when deploying end-to-end video streaming services with quality of service guarantee.