Sharing Online Video Streams in Wireless Mesh Access Networks

In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of users who access online videos from wireless access networks. It is highly desirable that such wireless networks be robust in handling sudden spurts in demand for certain videos due to occurrences like special events. An abrupt increase in network usage should not significantly impact normal access to other regular videos or other day-to-day applications in a well-designed system. In this paper, we tackle this problem in wireless mesh access networks by proposing a distributed video sharing technique called Dynamic Stream Merging for Access Networks (DSMAN). DSMAN improves the robustness of the access network without requiring directives from the video servers. In fact, it optimizes the video transport independent of video server participation/knowledge. We present a wireless mesh network prototype based on DSMAN. Our experimental results, based on the mobile YouTube website as the video source, validate the correctness of DSMAN and demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed technique.