iBE: A Novel Bandwidth Estimation Algorithm for Multimedia Services over

Abstract. Recently, multimedia streaming services over IEEE 802.11 based wireless networks have increased dramatically. This results in man-ifold increase in the bandwidth requirement, especially for high-quality multimedia services. Given the bandwidth constraint in the wireless net-works, one of the most critical factors in improving the end-to-end per-formance of multimedia application is the fast and accurate estimation of bandwidth. This paper proposes a novel bandwidth estimation algo-rithm, iBE. The significant feature of iBE is that it relies on multime-dia packets only from the application layer. In addition, iBE recognizes the dynamic fluctuations of the wireless channel quickly, which in-turn enables iBE to be used for real-time services. The experimental results demonstrate that the accuracy of the bandwidth estimated by iBE is sig-nificantly superior to other methods like Spruce. Secondly, even in high traffic conditions, the bandwidth estimated by iBE is very close to the actual measured bandwidth, unlike the other state-of-the-art methods. Key words: Wireless networks, bandwidth estimation, multimedia ser-vice.