Packet controller for video streaming over IEEE 802.11e

Abstract

Currently, mobile devices can process large amounts of data for watching high-definition video, browsing the Web, and downloading software. Wireless communication devices have become necessary because mobile devices such as smartphones enable people to retrieve data anywhere. Such a high level of convenience is accessible when quality of service is excellent, particularly when wireless network traffic is light. However, for several reasons the actual network traffic will be really heavy. Therefore, designing a mechanism that improves the efficiency of queue management is crucial for enhancing quality of service. This paper proposes a mechanism for queue management in IEEE 802.11e enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA). When a queue has no space for allocating packets, overflow occurs. By designing Tail Drop, the packets that have recently arrived (i.e., the overflow) are discarded until a queue has sufficient room for allocation. According to the EDCA protocol, the transmission opportunity (TXOP) is the finite time during which a machine may send packets. Queue management systems record information regarding successful transmissions. Based on previously collected information, the proposed queue management system decides whether the packets to be assigned to the corresponding transmission queue or not, according to the number of retransmissions. Our experiment results show that this system can efficiently reduce the average number of the discarded packets by 11.6% for video streaming.