IPTV Home Networking via 802.11 Wireless Mesh Networks: An Implementation Experience

Wireless multimedia home servers are the next generation of home entertainment systems. From a single broadband connection entering home, multimedia data is transmitted to TV and other peripherals using only wireless links. The provision of high quality time-critical multimedia services in indoor environment is very challenging due to high attenuation and multi-path fading caused by the walls and the contention in the shared wireless channel. In this paper, we demonstrate that mesh networking can help improve the service quality of both multimedia and data users, when the video packets are relayed with EDCA priorities based on their importance. Our results on a real wireless mesh network implementation using the new, high definition video streaming standard, H.264 verify our hypothesis, where we observe almost no degradation video quality, and very low, packet delay and loss rate in the presence of high amount of competing data traffic.(1)