Interference-aware video streaming over crowded unlicensed spectrum

Abstract

Video conferences over the Internet with multiple participants have to be wirelessly connected to improve the communication efficiency. However, video conferences are often held in places suffering from crowded wireless medium, such as offices and schools. This leads to many challenges on providing high video conferencing experience. In this paper, we study the problem of video streaming over crowded wireless networks considering the interference. We conducted extensive experiments to model the unlicensed spectrum activity and design, implement, and evaluate an interference-aware bandwidth estimation and rate adaptation algorithm. The experiment results show that our proposed solution (i) reduces the retransmission ratio to lower than 6.5%, (ii) reduces the packet loss rate to 0.5% on average, (iii) achieves higher throughput, and (iv) leads to higher video quality than others by at least 8.3 dB in video quality.