WEVCast: Wireless eavesdropping video casting architecture to overcome standard multicast transmission in Wi-Fi networks

Service providers and popular applications are actively focused on delivering of video service to consumers over an all IP infrastructure but they rarely care about how contents are really delivered to end users. Services and applications are mostly designed to be enjoyed trough a generic broadband connection even if Wi-Fi is widely seen as the preferred access network to interconnect consumer devices. Wi-Fi has largely been optimized for unicast connections but has insufficient bandwidth to support a large number of video streams; on the other hand, multicast over Wi-Fi suffers from several well-known problems such as low data rate, high losses and unfairness respect to other contending unicast transmissions and the multimedia content delivery could be a stumbling block for providers and consumers alike. With the aim to develop a new solution that makes Wi-Fi video distribution more feasible and cost-effective, we propose a new mechanism, called WEVCast (Wireless Eavesdropping Video Casting), to improve multicast transmission of video contents over standard Wi-Fi networks. We implemented a quite realistic simulation framework and we evaluated the performance of our solution taking into account the perceived video quality experimented by end users. The obtained results confirm that the proposed strategy is very simple, robust, scalable and extremely compatible with all off-the-shelf wireless devices since our main goal was the Wi-Fi standard compliance.