An active buffer management based on the virtual transmission delay for video streaming service

We propose an active buffer management scheme to guarantee quality of service (QoS) for video streaming services in wireless local area network (WLAN). The proposed scheme uses the concept of virtual transmission delay and differentiates the frame drop policy according to the type of video frame. The virtual transmission delay is defined as the delay until the video frame is potentially transmitted since a frame is arrived at the buffer. By the simulation result, the frame transmission delay does not exceed the delay bound when the proposed scheme is used. As a result, the number of frames of degraded peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) is reduced about 50% compared to the case that the conventional Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) is used. The proposed protocol also outperforms the EDCA in the actually visual quality of video streaming.