Hierarchical analysis of RealMedia streaming traffic on an IEEE 802.11b wireless LAN

The popularity of multimedia streaming on the Internet, combined with the growing deployment of wireless access networks, augurs the converging usage of these two technologies in the not-too-distant future. Experience with wireless multimedia streaming on today's networks can provide valuable insights into the design of future wireless multimedia networks and applications. In this paper, we present a measurement study of RealMedia streaming traffic on an indoor IEEE 802.11b wireless LAN. The traffic is analyzed hierarchically, from the application layer to the network layer to the data link layer. We focus on the traffic structure at each layer, and on interaction effects across layers. Our main observation is that streaming quality is quite robust in all but the poorest channel conditions, despite the inherent burstiness of both the RealMedia application workload and wireless channel errors. Several factors contribute to these good results. First, although RealVideo is typically...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2004
• Where: COMCOM
• Authors: Tianbo Kuang, Carey L. Williamson
• Keywords: Application Layer, COMCOM 2004, Wireless, Wireless Multimedia