Burst Transfer Eligibility Decision for Real-Time Streaming on Multi-Hop WPANs

In real-time video streaming data is only useful until its lifetime expires. The significant channel condition variations in case of multi-hop ad hoc networks undermine the quality of multimedia applications by introducing congestion and delay jitters. To overcome problems related to congestion, previous works considered media transcoding or selective packet dropping. However, these methods seems to be inadequate to eliminate stale packets with expired lifetime. In this paper we propose a mechanism, where the scheduler can decide if the respective frame is eligible or not for transmission, namely, if it can be entirely transmitted before its lifetime expires. For the decisions, only the length and deadline of upcoming frames are considered. The behavior of locally acting and feedback-based decision mechanisms are both explored through extensive simulations. Our approach performs better than the previous solutions in terms of effective channel utilization and end-to-end delay.