Adaptive unequal protection for wireless video transmission over IEEE 802.11e networks

Packet loss of video streams cannot be avoided at wireless links for limited wireless bandwidth and frequently changed environments. To provide differentiated Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees between multimedia and data services, IEEE 802.11e was proposed. However, its performance and flexibility need to be further improved. In this paper, after a survey on various modifications of IEEE 802.11e, we formulate the problem of video transmission over IEEE 802.11e networks to help scheme design and performance analysis. Then accompanied with in-depth analysis, an adaptive unequal protection schema is proposed, which is composed of three mechanisms: (1) Insert each video packet into the access category (AC) with the minimum relative queuing delay; (2) Assign each packet dynamically to a proper AC based on several parameters to guarantee the transmission of high priority frames; (3) Apply fuzzy logic controllers to adjust parameters so as to reply quickly to the variation of video data rate, coding structure and network load. Finally, regarding MPEG-4 codec as the example, we perform extensive evaluations and validate the effectiveness and flexibility of proposed scheme. Simulations are divided into WLAN and multihop parts, involving different video sequences and various traffic modes of data streams. Beside performance comparison between proposed scheme and other ones, influence of parameter setting and combination with routing algorithms are also evaluated.