Using MAC Frame Header for Efficient Multimedia Streaming over IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN

Error prone wireless channel induces error bursts in transmitted data frames and renders the frames unable to be decoded. Prevalent error control techniques work to combat the error effect through pre- or post-transmission control measures like FEC, ARQ, HARQ etc. All of these techniques induce some sort of processing and retransmission delay in net transmission duration. On other hand, applications transmitting multimedia contents and especially video contents are highly delay sensitive and exhibit hard real time requirements. However, a little degradation in quality of reconstructed video frames can be compromised for better throughput and minimized time delays. The idea of trade off between video quality and throughput has been proposed in this paper; implemented through a +modification to IEEE 802.11 frame format such that certain fields are marked to designate a frame as a video frame. Such designated frames are proposed to be treated differently from normal data frames in order to enhance video throughput and reduce transmission time delay. Results achieved are quite promising; although video frames with high motion contents possess degraded signal quality but perceptually the results seem satisfactory.