Enhanced QoS Through Optimized Architecture for Video Streaming Applications in Heterogeneous Networks

The exponential growth in the number of internet users for utilizing diversified applications, such as Voice over IP(VoIP), video on demand (VoD), video streaming and e-learning, has resulted in a steady increase in traffic on the transmission channel. Despite video streaming being a large contributor of traffic to both commercial and non-commercial uses, it still lags in the proper delivery of data to the users of cellular devices and another heterogeneous network. As the popularity of video streaming services increases, so does the user’s expectation for quality services. The poor quality of video streaming services has now become absolute in the video stream ecosystem. Therefore, video service providers have taken providing good Quality of Service to their users as their major goal. Provisioning of optimal QoS services in these applications become a challenging task for service providers in the presence of huge traffic and congestion. Since video streaming architecture follows a server-client architecture model, we propose to optimize the functions at the server-side to maximize QoS. The performance of the proposed architecture is compared with the existing architecture in terms of QoS features such as delay, delivery ratio and throughput for various data rates and buffer sizes. The proposed work is simulated using NS2 Simulator. The results show that, end to end delay is reduced by 10%, the delivery ratio is improved by 12% and throughput is improved by 17% when compared to the existing architecture.