Video Streaming Performance in Wireless Hostile Environments

Wireless networks have been among the main trends during the last few years. Their low-cost deployment and ubiquitous coverage have enabled the provision of numerous services to the end-users. Wireless local area networks (WLANs) are capable of providing many services with high quality of service (QoS), including not only email and web browsing, but also multimedia services. As the demand for more ubiquitous communications increases, mainly because of the rapid proliferation of the Wi-Fi enabled smart phones, wireless networks will play a crucial role in the future networks domain. Nevertheless, due to their open nature, these networks have several vulnerabilities that adversaries can exploit. In this paper, we use an adversary that violates several rules of the IEEE 802.11 protocol. We show, by collecting cross-layer measurements, how it can severely degrade the performance of an MPEG-4 encoded video streaming application. We also show that the traditional PSNR evaluation metric is not sufficient to characterize the video performance when an adversary is present.