Proactive Estimation of the Video Streaming Reception Quality in WiFi Using a Cross-Layer Technique

Abstract

The Quality of Service (QoS) in a Wireless Fidelity (WiFi) network can not be guaranteed due to intermittent disconnections, interferences and so forth because they reduce considerably the necessary QoS for multimedia applications. For that reason it is essential a software as the one we present in this paper that evaluates if there are the appropriate conditions to receive the streaming measuring the congestion, radio coverage, throughput, lost and received packets rate, and so on. Our software makes a proactive estimation using a bottom-up cross-layer technique measuring physical level parameters, Round Trip Time (RTT) and getting traffic statistics for the overall WiFi network and for each ongoing Real Time Streaming Protocol/Real Time Protocol (RTSP/RTP) streaming session. Experimental results show a high percentage of good decisions of the software to detect the wireless channel degradation and its recovery.