Opportunistic Wireless Broadcast (OWB): Dynamic redundancy detection in the wireless medium

Abstract

The demand for rich multimedia content is continuously increasing as exemplified by the success of sites such as YouTube, Google Video, and others. Critically, the richness of multimedia content places significant demands on the limited bandwidth available in wireless networks. To that end, this paper proposes a novel mechanism, opportunistic wireless broadcast (OWB), that opportunistically aggregates redundant content over short timescales into unified broadcasts in order to dramatically improve the efficiency of streaming media. Unlike end-to-end techniques such as application-layer multicast (ALM) or native IP multicast, OWB does not require modifications to the server or client applications, thus offering a practical transition for deployment. Experimental studies are presented showing that even with a minimal amount of redundancy, OWB can significantly improve network throughput and quality of service in terms of end-to-end delay.