Head-of-line blocking avoidance in multimedia streaming over wireless networks

In the paper, we address the influence of Head-of-line (HOL) blocking on real-time video streaming in wireless networks. We consider short channel failures when the probability of successful packet transmission to a station abruptly drops to a near zero value. In wireless networks, the duration of such channel failure intervals may reach some hundred milliseconds, making packets staying in the same queue and destined for other stations be blocked and experience large delays. Because of delay sensitivity of real-time traffic, the quality of the received videos degrades. In the paper, we propose a feasible for implementation queue management algorithm to avoid video quality degradation. We prove by simulation that our algorithm outperforms existing solutions significantly, minimizing video quality degradation for the streams destined for stations with channel failures while avoiding blocking streams destined for other stations.