Video streaming over cooperative wireless networks

We study the problem of broadcasting video streams over a WMAN to many mobile devices. We propose to form a cooperative network among mobile devices that receive the same video stream, and share received video data over a WLAN. The proposed system significantly reduces the energy consumption and the channel switching delay. We design a distributed leader election algorithm for the cooperative system and analytically show that the proposed system outperforms current systems in terms of energy consumption and channel switching delay. We evaluate the proposed system in a real mobile video streaming testbed as well as in a trace driven simulator. Our experimental results show that the proposed system: (i) achieves as high as 70% of energy saving gain, (ii) outperforms current systems with only three cooperative mobile devices, (iii) reduces channel switching delay by up to 98%, (iv) is robust under device failures and quickly reacts to network dynamics, and (v) uniformly distributes load across all cooperative devices.