A real-time streaming media transmission protocol for multi-hop wireless networks

Time delay as well as error accumulation makes transmission of high-quality streaming media over multi-hop wireless networks more challenging. Since conventional TCP/IP-based protocol drops and retransmits the whole packet once error(s) occur above Physical Layer, which leads to long time delay and low efficiency in transmission, a new protocol for real-time streaming media transmission is proposed in this paper. A packet control layer (PCL) is added between Data Link and Network Layer to enable error-polluted data be transmitted continuously while an error control layer (ECL) is inserted between Transport and Application Layer to further correct errors in data stream. Moreover, a robust header conversion method is applied to PCL to shorten time delay by reducing packet retransmission probability and decrease the redundancy of packet header. And an error-CRC-erasure coding scheme embedded with CRC error correcting algorithm is adopted in ECL. Simulations on DSP show that the proposed protocol can greatly reduce time delay and obtain better error correction performance compared with traditional protocol in BSC channel.