A Dynamic Stream Merging Technique for Video-on-Demand Services over Wireless Mesh Access Networks

We propose a Dynamic Stream Merging (DSM) technique for efficient video-on-demand services to mobile users on wireless mesh networks at the edges. DSM is a new communication paradigm, in which multicast topologies are created incrementally through dynamic merging of server streams at the mesh nodes. This is accomplished without the knowledge of the server. The formation of the multicast group in this manner is fundamentally different from traditional multicast techniques which rely on centralized control at the server. We present a system prototype and give experimental results to demonstrate the feasibility of this new approach. We also give simulation results based on the NS-2 simulator to show the performance efficiency in a larger system setting.