Seamless Video Streaming: A Light Weight Session Handoff Scheme for Dynamic Stream Merging Based Wireless Mesh Networks

The flexibility of Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) architecture has made it easier for the delivery of video streams over such networks. However, delivering video streams over WMNs increases workload on the mesh nodes, increases bandwidth usage due to dedicated streams and limits scalability. These challenges are overcome by using WMNs with Dynamic Stream Merging Capability (DSM) [1]. DSM is a communication sharing technique that can merge redundant streams at upstream nodes before flowing to downstream nodes in the multicast streaming tree. In spite of these benefits, there is a growing need to use a distributed session handoff scheme to support seamless video streaming for fast moving clients, which not many research works are concentrating on. Thus in this paper, we propose a light weight, fast and distributed scheme that uses a novel session rate prediction technique and a novel Dynamic Relationship Tree (DRT). The proposed session handoff scheme promotes workload sharing and supports mobile clients moving at speeds as high as 250 miles per hour. Based on extensive simulations performed in NS2 we found that the proposed scheme can provide robust and seamless inter and intra-domain session handoff producing less latency and overhead compared to existing schemes.