An interactive streaming system for image-based virtual environments over heterogeneous wired-wireless networks

Abstract

Recent advances in wireless networking and multimedia systems have opened new frontiers in the design of future generations of wireless multimedia systems while creating a new set of trade-offs. The limited bandwidth of wireless networks, along with their varying nature, poses a significant obstacle when interactively streaming the large volume of data that represents image-based virtual environments. In order to overcome this obstacle, we propose an interactive streaming system over wireless networks. The main contributions of this thesis are:(1) Design and implementation of a system architecture for interactive streaming of image-based virtual environments over wireless networks based on the client server paradigm. (2) Development of an interactive streaming protocol for the purpose of exchanging interactive requests and responses between streaming server(s) and clients. (3) Proposal of a real-time transport protocol (RTP) over wireless networks with a unique payload format and packetization scheme. (4) Proposal of an adaptive rate control algorithm, an immediate feedback mechanism, and a path prediction and pre-fetching scheme to make the streaming process more adaptable and coherent to the changes in network status, and to fully utilize the available bandwidth of the wireless network. We present our architecture and algorithms, their implementation, and an evaluation of their performance using an extensive set of simulation experiments.