Video Streaming with PCA and Hard vs Soft DRP

Video streaming over wireless links is a challenging issue due to the stringent quality-of-service requirement of video traffic and the contention nature of wireless media with limited channel resources. Various wireless Media Access Control (MAC) protocols have been proposed, and most of them follow either the contention-based or contention-free approach. In this paper, we propose to stream video traffic over both contention-based and contention-free MAC protocols, exampled by WiMedia UWB Prioritized Contention Access (PCA) and Distributed Reservation Protocol (DRP), and then evaluate the performance of such an approach with extensive simulation. The novelty of our approach is to use both PCA and DRP for every single video stream by reserving well below the peak data rate and handling traffic burst through reduced contention. The simulation results further reveal the tradeoff between hard and soft DRP with single or dual buffer on the performance of video streaming.