WINDOWS STREAMING MEDIA PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS ON A IEEE 802.11g RESIDENTIAL NETWORK

This paper presents a performance evaluation of Microsoft Windows Media Streaming (WMS) on an IEEE 802.11g home network. Empirical measurements are used to determine the viability of streaming High Definition (HD) and high quality video over a wireless residential network using currently available multimedia streaming software. User experience is evaluated using visual testbed observations and performance criteria that include playback time, transmission data rate, playout buffer fill percentages and wireless frame losses. While the experiments show that 8.1 Mbps HD content is not currently playable with acceptable quality using a WMS server over a wireless LAN (WLAN), this investigation demonstrates that WMS services can provide high quality streaming services over a residential WLAN.