The impact of interference-aware routing metrics on video streaming in Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless Mesh Networks form a wireless backbone that provides ubiquitous Internet access and support of multimedia services. In this scenario, traffic crosses multi-hop paths, through mesh routers and gateways, causing high levels of interference. To address this problem, the use of schemes that introduce routing metrics that take into account the characteristics of the interference have been made to improve the application performance. Given the diversity of interference-aware routing metrics for Wireless Mesh Networks, it is necessary to assess the impact of employing these routing metrics on multimedia traffic performance, and in particular, on video streaming. This paper seeks to fill this gap, by using simulation to evaluate the video streaming performance when the most relevant interference-aware routing metrics are used. The degree of video quality can be evaluated from two perspectives, the network viewpoint and the standpoint of the user perception. At the network level, video streaming quality is assessed through IP measures, that is, throughput, delay, jitter and routing overhead. At the user level, ‘Quality of Experience’ metrics are employed to measure the user perception with regard to the video quality. The evaluation of the performance takes account of outdoor and indoor environments. The results of the simulation study have shown that routing metrics based on the information that detects interference using accurate measures achieve a better network and user perception performance. However, depending on the environment (i.e., whether it is indoor or outdoor), all the routing metrics result in a different performance being achieved. Although interference-aware routing metrics affect the performance of both the network and the user levels, there are some cases where they have less impact on the user level, because the user perception parameters are less influenced by the behaviour of the network.