Streaming Video Performance and Enhancements in Resource-Constrained Wireless Networks

Streaming video is an increasingly popular application in wireless networks. The concept of a live streaming video yields several enticing possibilities: real-time video conferencing, television broadcasting, pay-per-view movie streaming, and more. These ideas have already been explored via the internet and have met with mixed success, largely due to the shortcomings of the underlying network. Taking streaming video to wireless networks, then, poses several significant challenges. Wireless networks are inherently more susceptible to failures and data corruption due to their unstable communications medium. This volatility suggests serious drawbacks for any implementation of streaming video. Video frame errors, jitter, and even complete sync loss are entirely conceivable in a wireless environment. Many of these issues have been undertaken and several approaches to mediation or even solution of these problems are underway. This thesis proposes to use advanced simulation techniques to properly exhaustively permute many vital parameters within a UMTS network and uncover, if they exist, bottlenecks in UMTS performance under considerable network load. This is accomplished via a described testing plan with simulation environment. Additionally this thesis proposes a new UDP-like transport layer specially optimized for streaming media over resource-constrained networks, tested to work with significant improvements under the UMTS cellular networking system. Finally this thesis provides several innovative new methods in the furtherance of the field of streaming media research in resourceconstrained and cellular environments. Overall this thesis makes several important contributes to an exciting and ever-growing field of active research and discussion