Performance evaluation of video streaming with background traffic over IEEE 802.11 WLAN networks

There is an increasing demand for multimedia streaming applications over WLAN networks. MPEG-4 and H.264 are compression standards targeted at high-quality streamed multimedia services over wireless best-effort IP networks. However, the dynamic nature of wireless networks in terms of fluctuating bandwidth and time-varying delays makes it difficult to provide good quality streaming under such constraints. Multimedia streaming applications are a demanding and challenging service to deliver over wireless networks. There is a trade-off between the capacity of the wireless network and the quality of the multimedia streaming application. In this paper we investigate the effect the background traffic load has on unicast streaming video sessions. We show that above a certain load value, the video streaming session is slowly starved of bandwidth. The load value at which this occurs depends on the characteristics of the background traffic load in terms of packet rates and the number of sources contributing to the load.