Wi-Fi for Video

Meeting the requirements for video-grade Wi-Fi Access Points article gives some interesting facts on transporting video over wireless LAN. Users are coming to expect a wireless video experience equivalent to video consumption over wires.

Traditionally a Wi-Fi device was measured according to its receiver performance, using metrics such as receive sensitivity. With video delivery, transmitter performance is ultimately measured according to user experience. Raw throughput is no longer an adequate metric for measuring wireless network performance, as was the case with internet data traffic.

If we use around 10-20 Mbps per HD stream, multiple HD stream delivery requires no more than 40-80 Mbps of actual throughput. The main challenge is to deliver this relatively modest throughput consistently and robustly across an entire home to multiple nodes. Quality-of-service (QoS) related metrics, such as packet loss, delay and jitter, to which HD video is highly sensitive, must be optimized as well, sometimes at the expanse of raw throughput.

This must be accomplished over a constantly changing and hostile wireless fading, interference prone channel. The challenge becomes converting an unpredictable medium into a controlled and managed one. We can’t control everything, but we need to make the system to work well enough to be enjoyable.