A Load Balancing Solution for Improving Video Quality in Loaded Wireless Network Conditions

There is an increasing user demand for high-quality content-rich multimedia services. Despite their advantages, current wireless networks in general and wireless mesh networks in particular have limitations in terms of quality of service (QoS) provisioning, especially when dealing with increased amounts of time sensitive traffic such as video. This paper presents video load balancing solution (ViLBaS), a load balancing-based mechanism which enhances delivery performance of video services over multi-hop wireless mesh networks and improves user quality of experience (QoE) levels. ViLBaS involves performance monitoring at the level of the nodes and load balancing by off-loading traffic from loaded nodes to less loaded neighboring nodes. Simulation-based results show how the proposed ViLBaS improves video delivery performance in terms of both QoS and QoE metrics [delay, throughput, packet loss, and peak signal-to-noise-ratio (PSNR)]. The comparison is performed against three other traditional approaches in different network topologies, for diverse video flow distributions, and different sizes for the video queue.