Efficient support for video communications in wireless home networks

This paper investigates the performance of video communications over wireless networks employing the recently proposed Time-Division Unbalanced Carrier Sense Multiple access (TDuCSMA) coordination function. TDuCSMA is fully IEEE 802.11 standard compliant but offers novel bandwidth management capabilities. In this work the peculiar characteristics of TDuCSMA are configured and exploited to maximize the performance of video communications in a realistic home networking scenario. Simulation results show significant performance improvements with respect to legacy IEEE 802.11 network. The video quality gains are up to 13 dB PSNR with 500 ms playout buffer, while the average delay of the video packets is much lower, for the same amount of video traffic offered to the network. These results significantly contribute to enhance the quality of experience of the users of the video communication.