IEEE 802.21-based seamless multicast streaming with dynamic playback control

With the explosion of video streaming available on the Internet, online multimedia applications become more popular in our days and the video quality of the Internet multimedia applications is directly affected by the network transmission state, which will be worse while switching the ongoing network connection from one wireless interface to another heterogeneous wireless technology, such as IEEE 802 families, UMTS (universal mobile telecommunications system) network and 3GPP LTE (3rd generation partnership project-long term evolution). In order to perform seamless handover between heterogeneous wireless networks, IEEE group proposed the "IEEE 802.21 standard" and defined a middleware function called "media independent handover function (MIHF)" to smooth the handover. In this paper, a dynamic playback control for multicasting streaming based on IEEE 802.21 is proposed to reduce the influence of handover between heterogeneous networks. In addition, we evaluate three different rate modes for seamless multicasting streams. The simulation results show that different playback frame rate modes, including the usual, incremental and linear modes, can achieve different video quality and can extend the playing time for handover video playback. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.