VideoMsg: A Wireless Video Distribution System

One of the key technological challenges to advance our knowledge-based society is the development of mobile multimedia communication systems and networks. With rapid advances in wireless packet networking technology, it is becoming possible to provide mobile users not only with data, voice, but also with video communication services. Many emerging mobile applications require the playback of video on the mobile hosts, and today's wireless networks are getting ready to provide sufficient bandwidth for support of compressed video transmission. With the increase in the bandwidth of wireless channels and the computing power of the mobile devices, it is expected that video service will be offered for wireless networks in the near future. In this paper we are especially interested in the issue of wireless video multicast, in which there may be hundreds and thousands of mobile hosts receiving the same video from one sender. Reliable video distribution over WLANs is still a challenging problem to solve. Transport of video content is very sensitive to bandwidth variability, delay jitter, packet error rates and types of packets in which errors occur. We present VideoMsg an audio-video distribution system over WLANs which provides the best combination of technologies for the transmission of video information to heterogeneous mobile users.