Presentation Deadline-Based Transmission Mechanism for IPTV Services over Wireless Networks

Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) services over Internet and wireless networks have been increasing rapidly in recent years. Video streaming over time-varying and error-prone wireless networks poses many challenges because it has stringent delay and jitter constraints and requires a smooth packet transmission rate. To overcome such issues, a presentation deadline-based cross-layer design for improving the QoS of IPTV services over wireless networks is introduced. The proposed cross-layer design uses the presentation timestamps in the RTP packet header to derive a presentation deadline for each MAC frame. Subsequently, the wireless Access Point (AP) employs the presentation deadline and the number of retries to determine whether a MAC frame needs to be sent or not. Additionally, the MAC frame size can adapt to the wireless channel conditions. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed transmission mechanism for video frames can avoid a waste of wireless bandwidth resources on transmitting lateness MAC frames. Thus, the proposed cross-layer design achieves a lower lateness loss rate and better application layer goodput for IPTV services.