Performance of multimedia applications over wireless local area networks

• Main Author: O Yang, Janice Shi Min
• Other Authors: School of Computer Engineering
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2012
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/50901
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

In the recent years, Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) technologies have emerged as a fast growing market with IEEE 802.11 standard as the dominating technology which is vastly used in many WLANs today. With the rise of multimedia application usage, wireless network are now expected to be able to support real time services with stringent Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. And with the increasing popularity of multimedia application, people requires services such as VoIP, High definition television (HDTV) and video streaming through WLAN connections. Hence, the importance of WLAN to support QoS to real time applications is crucial. In this report, the performance of multimedia application such as video streaming and VoIP is investigated. The performance is evaluated through simulations using Network Simulator 2 (NS-2), and performance metrics like delay, throughput and PSNR are calculated and graphs have been plotted. The simulations experiments in this report, is designed to evaluate the performance of video and VoIP traffics in 802.11b and 802.11e wireless network. It is also to examine the performance of video traffic under heavy and light load traffic networks, and how the channel’s parameters such as contention window, DIFS and AIFS values impact the performances of real time applications. The simulation results show that 802.11e EDCA channel access mechanism is able to provide service differentiation to the different types of traffics. In addition, it proves that with EDCA the network capacity is effectively increased to provide better support to multimedia applications like video streaming. Lastly, the results demonstrate that the channel’s parameter like contention window can affects the performance of multimedia applications.