Time-Aware Opportunistic Relay for Video Streaming Over WLANs

Robust video streaming over time-varying, error-prone wireless LANs (WLANs) poses many challenges. In this paper, we present a time-based opportunistic relay (TOR) scheme for high-quality video streaming over WLANs. The proposed scheme exploits path diversity in relaying packets with awareness of the time constraints of video data. Specifically, relay nodes continuously overhear and opportunistically forward packets to enhance end-to-end delivery rates. To relay a packet in a time-aware manner, a relay deadline is computed for each packet and used by relay nodes to determine whether they should relay or discard the packet. Simulation results show that TOR improves video quality by up to 9.76 dB.