Performance Evaluation of Resource Usage for Unicast Video Streaming over IEEE 802.11 WLAN Networks

Multimedia streaming applications are a demanding and challenging service to deliver over wireless networks. Such services have a large impact on the resource requirements of the WLAN. However, there are many variables involved in video streaming, such as the video content being streamed, how the video is encoded and how it is sent. This makes the role of radio resource management and the provision of QoS guarantees extremely difficult. In this paper we investigate the network resource requirements for three scenarios: a single unicast video streaming session; multiple unicast video streaming sessions and finally multiple unicast streaming sessions in the presence of background traffic. We present several key findings: we show the effect that the hint track MTU values has on the access and load requirements of the WLAN. We show that the WLAN becomes saturated when the offered load reaches a certain threshold that is related to the hint tract MTU setting. Finally, we present some preliminary results that show how the access and load requirements of the WLAN are affected when thee is background traffic contending for access to the medium