Link quality-aware overlay for video delivery over wireless mesh networks

In this mobile-centric era, users expect ubiquitous data access at low cost to an ever increasing range of applications requiring high data connection speeds. A positive solution is the use of Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) as they enable data access over a relatively large area at a modest cost and are relatively simple and flexible to deploy. Unfortunately, similar to other wireless multi-hop networks, WMN performance decreases with path length, background load, etc. In response to this, several approaches to manage traffic load have been proposed, including peer-to-peer solutions. However, in order to work efficiently, these solutions require not only availability awareness, but also knowledge about the conditions of the physical paths to peers and services. This paper first proposes a Multiplication Selector Metric (MSM) which addresses two major drawbacks of the traditional summation-based metrics for overlay peer selection: bottleneck link identification and hop count behavior. MSM can work with any link quality - aware metric without any additional network overhead. Then, a cross-layer Wireless Link Quality - aware Overlay peer selection mechanism (WLO) is proposed, which uses MSM to identify the best peer for overlay content retrieval. Simulations show how the proposed peer-to-peer video delivery solution for WMN outperforms existing state-of-the-art solutions in terms of video delivery quality.