Design And Implementation Of Intelligent Mesh Nodes For Wireless Video Stream Sharing

The gateways are the performance bottleneck of wireless mesh access networks. Using proxy servers or wireless peer-to-peer streaming techniques can help reduce the gateway load. However, these techniques, as a data caching method, do not save wireless resources. We consider a communication sharing approach in this paper. More specifically, we introduce a robust and scalable wireless mesh access network prototype that can reduce both the gateway load and wireless traffic for video applications. It has the intelligence to handle sudden spike in demand for certain videos due to specific events preventing it from adversely effecting other daily wireless traffic. It can also leverage the 80:20 data access pattern, common for many video applications, to substantially increase the service throughput. We explain the Dynamic Stream Merging technique, present the system prototype, and discuss the experimental results. © 2011 ACM