Scalable Resource Management for Video Streaming Over IEEE802.11A/E

Delay-constrained streaming of fully-scalable video over IEEE 802.11a/e wireless (WLANs) is of great interest for many emerging multimedia applications. In this paper, we consider the problem of video transmission over HCF controlled channel access (HCCA), which is part of the new medium access control (MAC) protocol of IEEE 802.11e. A cross-layer optimization across the MAC and application layers is used in order to exploit the features provided by the new HCCA standard, as well as by the versatility of new state-of-the-art scalable video coding algorithms. Under pre-determined delay constraints for streaming, the proposed cross-layer strategy leads to a larger number of stations being simultaneously admitted (without any loss in the video quality) than in systems that utilize application-layer only optimizations. At the same time, the fine-grain layering provided by the scalable bitstream facilitates prioritization and unequal retransmissions of packets at the MAC layer thereby enabling graceful quality degradation under channel-capacity limitations and delay constraints. The expected gains offered by the optimized solutions proposed in this paper are established through simulations