A handover-aware seamless video streaming scheme in heterogeneous wireless networks

With the development of wireless technologies, video streaming services over heterogeneous wireless networks have become more popular in recent years. Video streaming schemes for heterogeneous networks should consider vertical handover in which the link capacity is varied significantly, because the quality experienced for a video streaming service is affected by the network status. When a vertical handover occurs, an abrupt bandwidth change and substantial handover latency lead to bursty packet loss and discontinuity of the video playback. In this paper, we propose a handover-aware video streaming scheme to provide seamless video streaming services over heterogeneous wireless networks. The proposed scheme adjusts its sending rate and the quality level of the transmitted video streams according to the significant bandwidth variation that occurs in a vertical handover. To expedite the response to the bandwidth variation due to a handover, our scheme uses an explicit notification message that informs the streaming server of a client's handover occurrence. In order to evaluate the performance, we use a simulation environment for a vertical handover between wireless local area networks and cellular networks. Through the simulation results, we prove that our scheme improves the experienced quality of video streaming in vertical handovers.