A Robust Mobile Video Streaming in Heterogeneous Emerging Wireless Systems

Abstract

With the rapid development of heterogeneous emerging wireless technologies and numerous types of mobile devices, the need to support robust mobile video streaming based on the seamless handover in Future Internet is growing. To support the seamless handover, several IP-based mobility management protocols such as Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6), fast handover for the MIPv6 (FMIPv6), Hierarchical MIPv6 (HMIPv6) and Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) were developed. However, MIPv6 depreciates the Quality-of-Service (QoS) and FMIPv6 is not robust for the video services in heterogeneous emerging wireless networks when the Mobile Node (MN) may move to another visited network in contrast with its anticipation. In Future Internet, the possibility of mobile video service failure is more increased because mobile users consisting of multiple wireless network interfaces (WNICs) can frequently change the access networks according to their mobility in heterogeneous wireless access networks such as 3Generation (3G), Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi), Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMax) and Bluetooth co-existed. And in this environment, seamless mobility is coupled according to user preferences, enabling mobile users to be “Always Best Connected”(ABC) so that Quality of Experience is optimised and maintained. Even though HMIPv6 and PMIPv6 are proposed for the location management, handover latency enhancement, they still have limit of local mobility region. In this paper, we propose a robust mobile video streaming in Heterogeneous Emerging Wireless Systems. In the proposed scheme, the MN selects the best -according to an appropriate metric- wireless technology for a robust video streaming service among all wireless technologies by reducing the handover latency and initiation time when handover may fail. Through performance evaluation, we show that our scheme provides more robust mechanism than other schemes.