Date of Award

12-2012

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Legacy Department

Electrical Engineering

Committee Chair/Advisor

Wang, Kuang-Ching

Committee Member

Russell , Harlan B

Committee Member

Komo , John

Abstract

Most next-generation wireless networks are expected to support video stream-
ing which constitutes the bulk of traffic on the Internet. This thesis evaluates the
performance of video streaming in a vehicle network with an infrastructure wireless
mesh network (WMN) backhaul. Several studies have investigated video quality per-
formance primarily in single hop wireless networks and static WMNs. This thesis is
based on those studies and conducts the study in relation to a network where the
multi-hop features of the mesh network and mobility of the streaming clients may
have substantial impact on the perceived video quality in the network.
The study assumes a previously proposed vehicle network architecture con-
sisting of an infrastructure WMN that serves as the mesh backhaul [2, 3]. A number
of mesh routers (MRs) form the mesh backhaul using one of their two IEEE 802.11g
radios whereas the other radio is used to communicate with the fast moving mesh
clients (MCs). Selective MRs called mesh gateways (MGs) are connected to a wired
network (e.g., the Internet, hereafter referred to as the core network) via a point-to-
point link and provide gateway connectivity to the rest of the network. A server on
the core network acts as a video server and streams individual video streams to the
fast moving MCs. Upon deployment, network discovery occurs and segregates the
network into a number of separate routing zones with each routing zone consisting
of a single MG and all the MRs that use the MG as their gateway. A minimum-hop based routing protocol is used to enable seamless handover of MCs from one MR to
another within a single zone.
Simulation studies in this thesis inspects the network and video streaming
performance within a single routing zone, assuming the handoff and inter-zone routing
being taken care of by the routing protocol and only focus on the intra-zone packet
forwarding and scheduling impacts. Hence, this study does not address cases where
MCs move from one routing zone to another routing zone in the mobile network.
In the first part of the study, we evaluate the performance of video streaming in
the described network by studying performance metrics across different layers of the
protocol stack. The number of video flows that can be supported by the network is
experimentally determined for each scenario. In the second part, the thesis studies
controllable network and protocol parameters' ability to improve the network and
video quality performance. Simulations are run in an integrated framework that
includes network-simulator ns-2, NS-MIRACLE, and Evalvid.

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