An On-Off Queue Control Mechanism for Scalable Video Streaming over the IEEE 802.11e WLAN

In this paper, we study the issue of scalable video streaming over IEEE 802.11e EDCA WLANs. Our basic idea is to control the number of "active" nodes on the channel in order to reduce collisions under heavy traffic conditions. Specifically, we propose a distributed on-off queue control (OOQC) mechanism, which is designed to maintain high network throughput while keeping packet loss due to collision as low as possible. A low priority early drop (LPED) method is also employed to drop the packets at the queue according to packet relative priority index (RPI) provided by scalable video coding. Simulation results show that our proposed OOQC scheme significantly outperforms EDCA in received video quality.