Return to search

ActiveSTB: an efficient wireless resource manager in home networks

The rapid growth of new wireless and mobile devices accessing the internet has
led to an increase in the demand for multimedia streaming services. These home-based
wireless connections require efficient distribution of shared network resources which is a
major concern for the transport of stored video. In our study, a set-top box is the access
point between the internet and a home network. Our main goal is to design a set-top box
capable of performing network flow control in a home network and capable of quality
adaptation of the delivered stream quality to the available bandwidth. To achieve our
main goal, estimating the available bandwidth quickly and precisely is the first task in
the decision of streaming rates of layered and scalable multimedia services. We present
a novel bandwidth estimation method called IdleGap that uses the NAV (Network
Allocation Vector) information in the wireless LAN. We will design a new set-top box
that will implement IdleGap and perform buffering and quality adaptation to a wireless
network based on the IdleGap’s bandwidth estimate. We use a network simulation tool
called NS-2 to evaluate IdleGap and our ActiveSTB compared to traditional STBs. We
performed several tests simulating network conditions over various ranges of cross
traffic with different error rates and observation times. Our simulation results reveal
how IdleGap accurately estimates the available bandwidth for all ranges of cross traffic
(100Kbps ~ 1Mbps) with a very short observation time (10 seconds). Test results also
reveal how our novel ActiveSTB outperforms traditional STBs and provides good QoS
to the end-user by reducing latency and excess bandwidth consumption.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-1071
Date15 May 2009
CreatorsHall, Varrian Durand
ContributorsKim, Eun Jung
Source SetsTexas A and M University
Languageen_US
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeBook, Thesis, Electronic Thesis, text
Formatelectronic, application/pdf, born digital

Page generated in 0.0014 seconds