The Effects of Contention among Stations on Video Streaming Applications over Wireless Local Area Networks: an Experimental Approach
Nicola Cranley, Tanmoy Debnath · Arrow@dit (Dublin Institute of Technology) · 2007
Multimedia streaming applications have a large impact on the resource requirements of the WLAN. There are many variables involved in video streaming, such as the video content being streamed, how the video is encoded and how it is sent. This makes the role of radio resource management and the provision of QoS guarantees extremely difficult. For video streaming applications, packet loss and packets dropped due to excessive delay are the primary factors that affect the received video quality. In this paper, we experimentally analyse the effects of contention on the performance of video streaming applications with a given delay constraint over IEEE 802.11 WLANs. We show that as contention levels increase, the frame transmission delay increases significantly despite the total offered load in the network remaining constant. We provide an analysis that demonstrates the combined effects of contention and the playout delay constraint have on the video frame transmission delay.